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Selections from Ruskin 



(ON READING AND OTHER SUBJECTS) 



By EDWIN GINN 



:it}) Notes anti a Skctrij of Eusfein^s Htfe 



Bv D. H. M. -v^ ^ , 



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J>«4c 




BOSTON 
^ GINN & COxMPANY, PUBLISHERS 

1888 



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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1888, by 

EDWIN GINN, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



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Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co., Boston. 
Presswork by Ginn & Co., Boston. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. John Ruskin v 

II. Books and Reading (First Lecture) . . . . i 

III. Books and Reading (Second Lecture) .... 52 

IV. War 89 

V. Work 114 

VI. Index to Notes 147 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



This volume contains Ruskin's four lectures on Books and 
Reading, War, and Work, selected from " Sesame and Lilies," 
and the " Crown of Wild Olive," and slightly abridged for 
school use. 

Such notes have been added as seemed necessary for the 
complete understanding of the text. 



JOHN RUSKIN. 



3>«KC 



JOHN RUSKIN, " the greatest living master of English 
prose," was born nearly seventy years ago (1819), in a 
dreary London street not far from the British Museum. 
He was an only and a lonely child, having no other prospect 
during his early years " than that of the brick walls over 
the way," and such amusements as he could find for him- 
self in counting the bricks in those walls, watching the 
filling of the water-cart at the hydrant, and the like. With 
such slender resources the boy unconsciously began that 
method of self-instruction which was ultimately to make 
him one of the leading minds and educators of the age. 

Of his parents he says : " My father began business as a 
wine-merchant, with no capital, and a considerable amount 
of debts bequeathed him by my grandfather. He accepted 
the bequest, and paid them all before he began to lay by 
anything for himself, for which his best friends called him 
a fool, and I, without expressing any opinion as to his 
wisdom, which I knew in such matters to be at least equal 
to mine, have written on the granite slab over his grave 
that he was 'an entirely honest merchant.' "^ 

1 These and the following quoted passages are taken chiefly from Ruskin's 
*' Prxterita," a series of autobiographic sketches now in course of publication, 
and from his " Fors Clavigera." 



vi JOHN RUSK IN. 

Ruskin's mother had made up her mind to "devote him 
to God," or, in other words, to educate him for the ministry, 
and to that end her disciphne was somewhat strict ; but, as 
he says, ''entirely right, for a child of my temperament." 
He was early taught the inestimable lesson of taking care 
of himself and of not being troublesome ; "and," as he says, 
"being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as 
I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene 
and secure methods of life and motion." 

With a view to the lad's future eminence as a clergyman, 
he was taken regularly to church, where he tells us, " I 
found the bottom of the pew so extremely dull a place to 
keep quiet in (my best story-books being also taken away 
from me in the morning), that the horror of Sunday used 
even to cast its prescient gloom as far back in the week as 
Friday; and all the glory of Monday, with church seven 
days removed again, was no equivalent for it." 

In the course of a few years the dismal house in town 
was given up, and a cheerful one with a garden taken on 
Heme Hill, just outside the city's roar and smoke. "The 
differences of primal importance," says Ruskin, "which I 
observed between the nature of this garden, and that of 
Eden, as I had imagined it, were, that, in this one, all the 
fruit was forbidden ; and there were no companionable 
beasts ; in other respects, the little domain answered every 
purpose of Paradise to me; and the climate, in that cycle of 
our years, allowed me to pass most of my life in it. My 
mother never gave me more to learn than she knew I could 
easily get learnt, if I set myself honestly to work, by twelve 
o'clock. She never allowed anything to disturb me when 
my task was set ; if it was not said rightly by twelve o'clock, 
I was kept in till I knew it, and in general, even when Latin 



JOHN RUSK IN. Vll 

grammar came to supplement the Psalms, I was my own 
master for at least an hour before half-past one dinner, and 
for the rest of the afternoon." 

Ruskin's father always returned punctually from his 
business at half-past four and spent the evening reading 
aloud, the boy sitting in a little recess like an "idol in a 
niche," and listening if he chose. Speaking of these read- 
ings, he says, "The series of the Waverley novels, then 
drawing towards its close, was still the chief source of delight 
in all households caring for literature ; and I can no more 
recollect the time when I did not know them than when I 
did not know the Bible." Later, "I heard all the Shake- 
speare comedies and historical plays again and again . . . 
and all Don Quixote." "Such being the salutary pleasures 
of Heme Hill, I have next with deeper gratitude to chroni- 
cle what I owed to my mother for- the resolutely consistent 
lessons which so exercised me in the Scripture as to make 
every word of them familiar to my ear in habitual music, 
• — yet in that familiarity reverenced, as transcending all 
thought, and ordaining all conduct." 

"This she effected, not by her own sayings or personal 
authority, but simply by compelling me to read the book 
through for myself. As soon as I was able to read with 
fluency, she began a course of Bible work with me, which 
never ceased till I went to Oxford. She read alternate 
verses with me, watching, at first, every intonation of my 
voice, and correcting the false ones, till she made me 
understand the verse, if within my reach, rightly and 
energetically. It might be beyond me altogether; that 
she did not care about ; but she made sure that as soon 
as I got hold of it all, I should get hold of it by the right 
end." 



Vlll JOHN RUSK IN. 

" In this way she began with the first verse of Genesis, 
and went straight through to the last verse of the Apoca- 
lypse ^ ; hard names, numbers, Levitical law, and all ; and 
began again at Genesis the next day. If a name was hard, 
the better the exercise in pronunciation, — if a chapter 
was tiresome, the better lesson in patience, — if loathsome, 
the better lesson in faith that there was some use in its 
being so outspoken." " It is strange that of all the pieces 
of the Bible which my mother thus taught me, that which 
cost me most to learn, and that which was to my child's 
mind chiefly repulsive, — the 119th Psalm,^ — has now be- 
come of all the most precious to me, in its overflowing 
and glorious passion of love for the Law of God, in oppo- 
sition to the abuse of it by modern preachers of what they 
imagine to be His gospel." 

''And truly, though I have picked up the elements of 
a little further knowledge, — in mathematics, meteorology, 
and the like, in after life, — and owe not a little to the 
teaching of many people, this maternal installation of my 
mind in this property of chapters, I count very con- 
fidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the one 
essejttial part of all my education." 

"And for best and truest beginning of all blessings, I 
had been taught the perfect meaning of Peace, in thought, 
act, and word." 

" I never had heard my father's or mother's voice 
once raised in any question with each other ; nor seen an 
angry, or even slightly hurt or offended, glance, in the eye 
of either. I had never heard a servant scolded ; nor even 

1 Apocalypse : Revelation. 

2 Beginning " Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of 
the Lord." 



JOHN RUSK IN. IX 

suddenly, passionately, or in any severe manner blamed. 
I had never seen a moment's trouble or disorder in any 
household matter ; nor anything whatever either done in 
a hurry, or undone^ in due time." *' I had never done any 
wrong that I knew of — beyond occasionally delaying the 
commitment to heart of some improving sentence, that I 
might watch a wasp on the window pane, or a bird in the 
cherry-tree ; and I had never seen any grief." 

** Next to this quite priceless gift of Peace, I had re- 
ceived the perfect understanding of the nature of Obedi- 
ence and Faith. I obeyed word, or lifted finger, of father 
or mother, simply as a ship her helm ; not only without 
idea of resistance, but receiving the direction as a part 
of my own life and force." " And my practice in Faith 
was soon complete : nothing was ever promised me that 
was not given, nothing ever threatened me that was not 
inflicted, and nothing ever told me that was not true." 

" Peace, obedience, faith ; these three for chief good ; 
next to these, the habit of fixed attention with both eyes 
and mind — on which I will not further enlarge at this 
moment, this being the main practical faculty of my life, 
causing Mazzini ^ to say of me in conversation authenti- 
cally reported, a year or two before his death, that I had 
'the most analytic mind in Europe.' An opinion in which, 
so far as I am acquainted with Europe, I am myself en- 
tirely disposed to concur." 

If such a training had great advantages, it also had its 
under side of detriment. Ruskin speaks frankly of the 
evil, and says at the close: "My judgment of right and 

1 Undone : here, in sense of not done. 

2 Mazzini (Mat-see' nee) : a distinguished Italian patriot and writer; he 
died in 1872. 



X JOHN RUSK IN. 

wrong, and powers of independent action, were left en- 
tirely undeveloped ; because the bridle and blinkers were 
never taken off me. Children should have their times of 
being off duty, like soldiers." " But the ceaseless authority 
exercised over my youth left me, when cast out at last into 
the world, unable for some time to do more than drift 
with its vortices.^ " Meantime, while this home education 
was going on, Ruskin was getting the ideas which are 
awakened by travel. Every summer his father took a 
long vacation, or, more strictly speaking, a tour for orders, 
through half the English counties, and perhaps a visit 
to Scotland, the native land of the Ruskin family. This 
journey, which occupied a couple of months, was made 
either in a hired post-chaise and pair, or in a comfortable, 
old-fashioned chariot which Mr. Ruskin borrowed from 
his business partner. 

"This mode of journeying was as fixed as that of our 
home life. We went from forty to fifty miles a day, start- 
ing always early enough in the morning to arrive comfort- 
ably to four-o'clock dinner. Generally, therefore, getting 
off at six o'clock, a stage or two was done before break- 
fast, with the dew on the grass, and first scent from the 
hawthorns ; if in the course of the midday drive there 
were any gentleman's house to be seen, — or, better still, 
a lord's — or, best of all, a duke's, — my father baited the 
horses, and took my mother and me reverently through 
the state rooms ; always speaking a little under our breath 
to the housekeeper, major domo,^ or other authority in 
charge ; and gleaning worshipfully what fragmentary illus- 
trations of the history and domestic ways of the family 
might fall from their lips." 

1 Vortices : eddies. - Major domo : steward or general manager. 



JOHN RUSK IN. xi 

"I thus saw nearly all the noblemen's houses in Eng- 
land ; in reverent and healthy delight of uncovetous admi- 
ration, — perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any politi- 
cal truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live 
in a small house, and have Warwick Castle to be aston- 
ished at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing 
to be astonished at ; but that, at all events, it would not 
make Brunswick Square^ more pleasantly habitable, to 
pull Warwick Castle down. And at this day, though I 
have kind invitations enough to visit America, I could not, 
even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable 
as to possess no castles." 

With the yearly excursions through the country, with 
home study, reading under various tutors of the neighbor- 
hood, attempts at poetry, and, later, bits of sketching, 
done not only during the summer vacations in England, 
but also during trips to the continent, Ruskin reached the 
age when he was to enter college. His acquirements were 
not great in the classics, and were still less in mathe- 
matics ; but he had made pretty thorough acquaintance 
with several of the great English authors, he had fallen in 
love with Turner's pictures, as reproduced in Rogers's 
Italy, and he had learned to use his eyes, so that he was 
beginning to read with delight and profit that revelation of 
the hills and the sea which were to so deeply influence his 
whole future life and work. 

Accordingly, in the autumn of 1836, Ruskin, accom- 
panied by his father and mother, went up to Oxford to 
become a member of Christ Church, the favorite college 
of the English nobility. ''There," he says, "I was entered 

1 An allusion to his first home, No. 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, 
London. 



xii JOHN RUSK IN. 

as a gentleman-commoner^ without further debate, and 
remember still, as if it were yesterday, the pride of first 
walking out of the Angel Hotel, and past University 
College, holding my father's arm, in my velvet cap and 
silk gown." 

" Yes, good reader, the velvet and silk made a differ- 
ence, not to my mother only, but to me ! Quite one of the 
telling and weighty points in the home debates . . . had been 
that the commoner's gown [worn by the poorer class of 
students] was not only of ugly stuff, but had no flowing 
lines in it, and was virtually only a black rag tied to one's 
shoulders. One was twice a gownsman in a flowing 
gown." 

" So little, indeed, am I disposed now in maturer years 
to deride these unphilosophical feelings, that instead of 
effacing distinctions of dress at the University (except for 
the boating clubs), I would fain have seen them extended 
into the entire social order of the country. I think that 
nobody but duchesses should be allowed to wear dia- 
monds ; and that lords should be known from common 
people by their stars, a quarter of a mile off ; that every 
peasant girl should boast her country by some dainty rati- 
fication ^ of cap or bodice ; and that in the towns a vintner^ 
should be known from a fishmonger by the cut of his 
jerkin.4" 

A few months after the donning of the silk gown which 
gave rise to the above reflections, Ruskin entered on his 
college duties, which began each day with religious service 

1 Gentleman-commoner: one of the highest rank of students at Oxford, 
below the nobiUty, — one who takes his meals at the common college table, 
but supports himself. 

2 Ratification : here, perhaps, in sense of device. 

3 Vintner: a wine-seller. ^ Jerkin : jacket. 



JOHN RUSK IN. xiii 

in the choir of the cathedral used as a chapel by Christ 
Church College. "There," he says, "met every morning a 
congregation representing the best of what Britain had 
become, orderly, as the crew of a man-of-war, in the goodly 
ship of their temple. Every man in his place, according 
to his rank, age, and learning; every man of sense or heart 
there recognizing that he was either fulfilling, or being pre- 
pared to fulfil, the gravest duties required of Englishmen. 
None of us then conscious of any need or chance of change, 
least of all the stern captain, who with rounded brow and 
glittering dark eye, led in his old thunderous Latin the 
responses of the morning prayer." 

" For all that I saw, and was made to think, in that 
cathedral choir, I am most thankful to this day." 

" The influence on me of the next goodliest part of the 
college buildings, — the hall, — was of a different and 
curiously mixed character. Had it only been used, as it 
only ought to have been, for festivity and magnificence . . . 
the hall, like the cathedral, would have had an entirely 
salutary and beneficently solemnizing effect on me, hallow- 
ing to me my daily bread, . . . but the Abbot ^ allowed our 
hall to be used for 'collections.' The word is wholly 
abominable to my mind, whether as expressing extorted 
charities in church, or extracted knowledge in examination. 
' Collections ' in scholastic sense meant the college exam- 
ination at the end of every term, at which the Abbot had 
the worse than bad taste to be present as our inquisitor, 
though he had never once presided at our table as our 
host. Of course the collective quantity of Greek pos- 
sessed by all the undergraduate heads in hall was, to Jiimy 
infinitesimal. Scornful at once, and vindictive, thunder- 

1 The Abbot : here, the Dean or head of the college. 



xiv JOHN RUSK IN. 

ous always, more sullen and threatening as the day went 
on, he stalked with baleful emanation of Gorgonian^ cold 
from dais^ to door, and door to dais, of the majestic tor- 
ture chamber, — vast as the great hall of Venice, but 
degraded now by the mean terrors, swallow-like under its 
eaves, of doleful creatures who had no counsel in them, 
except how to hide their crib^ at each fateful Abbot's 
transit. Of course / never used a crib, but I believe the 
Dean * would rather I had used fifty, than borne the puz- 
zled and hopeless aspect which I presented, towards the 
afternoon, over whatever I had to do. And as my Latin 
writing was, I suppose, the worst in the university, — as I 
never by any chance knew a first from a second future, or, 
even to the end of my Oxford career, could get into my 
head where the Pelasgi^ lived, or where the Heraclidae 
returned from, — it may be imagined with what sort of 
countenance the Dean gave me his first and second fingers 
to shake at our parting, or with what comfort I met the 
inquiries of my father and mother as to the extent to 
which I was, in college opinion, carrying all before me." 

When it came, however, to essay-writing, with the read- 
ing of the same in public, the case was different. Here 
young Ruskin felt that he could distinguish himself. 
The outcome of his painstaking effort was somewhat sur- 
prising. '' I read my essay, I have reason to believe, not 
ungracefully ; and descended from the rostrum to receive 
— as I doubted not — the thanks of the gentlemen-com- 
moners for this creditable presentment of that body. 

1 Gorgonian : terrific. ^ Dais : here, a platform at the end of the room. 
3 Crib : a literal translation of a classic author, — a " pony." 
* Dean : this title is exclusively attached to the headship of Christ Church 
College ; Ruskin apparently uses Abbot as synonymous with it. 
5 Pelasgi and Heraclidae : ancient Greek races. 



JOHN RUSK IN. XV 

** Not in envy truly, but in fiery disdain, varied in ex- 
pression through every form and manner of the EngUsh 
language . . . they explained to me that I had committed 
grossest lhe~majcste^ against the order of gentlemen-com- 
moners ; that no gentleman-commoner's essay ought ever 
to contain more than twelve lines, with four words in each ; 
and that even indulging to my folly, and conceit, and want 
of savoh' faire^ the impropriety of writing an essay with 
any meaning in it, like vulgar students — the thoughtless- 
ness and audacity of writing one that would take at least 
a quarter of an hour to read, and then reading it all, might 
for this once be forgiven to such a greenhorn, but that 
Coventry ^ wasn't the word for the place I should be sent 
to if ever I did such a thing again." 

On his twenty-first birthday, being then in his last year 
at Oxford, Ruskin's father made him a present of a draw- 
ing by Turner, and also $1000 a year for spending money, 
of which the young man almost immediately spent ^350 
for a little water-color by Turner, sixteen inches by nine, 
representing the Welsh castle and village of Harlech. 
Shortly after this, his health began to fail. He was 
attacked with a cough attended by raising of blood, and 
was ordered by the doctors to spend the winter in Italy. 
It proved to be the end of his college life. Looking back 
to it, he says, '* Oxford taught me as much Greek and 
Latin as she could ; and though I think she might also 
have told me that fritillaries * grew in Mey^ meadow, it 

1 Lese-majeste: treason. 

2 Savoir faire : good breeding. 

^ Coventry : " to send to Coventry," to cut off from all social intercourse, 
— to " boycott." 

* Fritillary : a kind of lily, having bright red or yellow flowers. 
^ Iffley : a delightful suburb of Oxford. 



xvi JOHN RUSK IN. 

was better that she left me to find them for myself, than 
that she should have told me, as nowadays she would, that 
the painting on them was only to amuse the midges." 

Of the journey to Italy, Ruskin says, ''However dearly 
bought, the permission to cease reading,^ and put what 
strength was left into my sketching again, gave healthy 
stimulus to all faculties which had been latently progres- 
sive in me ; and the sketch-book and rulers were prepared 
for this journey on hitherto unexampled stateliness of 
method." 

The young man went the usual round, but refused to 
see many things — pictures and statuary — in the manner 
prescribed by the guide-books, daring even to call frescos 
bad which Murray told him he must believe good, and to 
pronounce good what all orthodox critics of art were 
agreed was altogether bad, and therefore not to be looked 
at. After this there were travels in France, with more 
sketches, and then a quiet settling down in a little country 
village in England, with some painting done in imitation 
of Turner. Finally, in the summer of 1840, Ruskin was 
introduced to the artist himself whom he had long admired 
at a distance as " the greatest of the age." " I found in him," 
he says, "a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter- 
of-fact, English-minded — gentleman : good-natured evi- 
dently, bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, 
shrewd, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the 
powers of the mind not brought out with any delight in 
their manifestation, or intention of display, but flashing 
out occasionally in a word or a look." 

Turner had some friends, but many enemies, among the 
critics, who called his pictures flimsy, tawdry, and meaning- 

1 Reading: in the sense of study. 



JOHN RUSK IN. xvii 

less. In Ruskin, the old man — for he was then old — found 
an enthusiastic champion. In 1843 Rnskin- published, 
anonymously, the first volume of his " Modern Painters," 
in defence of his friend. It came too late to give pleasure 
to the great painter, at whom the world had long scoffed, 
for his health had suddenly given way, and '' he was dead 
as an artist, and dying as a man." The volume was re- 
ceived with storms of abuse from those whose prejudices 
it assailed and mercilessly uprooted. " Blackwood's Maga- 
zine" was especially severe on the unknown writer who 
had had the audacity to tell the English public that their 
art critic guides were but ''blind leaders of the blind." 
But the "Oxford Graduate," as he signed himself, was 
so far from being silenced by the theatrical thunder of 
"Blackwood" that in the next edition he solicited for the 
editor of that periodical "the respect due to honest, hope- 
less, helpless imbecility." 

Ruskin spent a good part of twenty years of labor on 
this book. It gradually expanded from a modest little 
volume into a vast treatise on the principles of all art. 
Of it he said, " It differs from most books, that it has not 
been written either for fame, or for money, or for con- 
science' sake, but of necessity." 

Meanwhile he was also busy in many ways and on other 
works, notably on "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" 
arid "The Stones of Venice." In both his aim was to 
show that "all great architecture is the exponent of na- 
tional virtue, and all debased architecture that of national 
vice and shame." He also found time to give several 
courses of lectures on architecture and painting, in one of 
which, delivered at Edinburgh in 1853, he reaffirms his 
judgment of Turner in the following words : " I did not 



xviii JOHN RUSK IN. 

come here to tell you of my beliefs or conjecturei.'; I came 
here to tell you the truth which I have given fifteen years 
of my life to ascertain, that this man, this Turner, of whom 
you have known so little while he was living among you, 
will one day take his place beside Shakespeare and Veru- 
lam,^ in the annals of the light of England. Yes : beside 
Shakespeare and Verulam, a third star in that central con- 
stellation, round which, in the astronomy of intellect, all 
other stars make their circuit. By Shakespeare, humanity 
was unsealed to you ; by Verulam, the principles of nature ; 
and by Turner, her aspect. All these were sent to unlock 
one of the gates of light, and to unlock it for the first time. 
But of all the three, though not the greatest. Turner was 
the most unprecedented in his work. Bacon did what 
Aristotle had attempted ; Shakespeare did perfectly what 
^schylus did partially; but none before Turner had lifted 
the veil from the face of nature; the majesty of the hills 
and forests had received no interpretation, and the clouds 
passed unrecorded from the face of heaven which they 
adorned, and of the earth to which they ministered."^ 

After i860 a great change took place in the bent of Mr. 
Ruskin's mind. Since then he has devoted his pen mainly 
to books on social and educational subjects, of which latter 
class " Sesame and Lilies," and a series of monthly " Letters 
to the Workmen and Laborers of Great Britain," begun in 
1 87 1 and still continued, are characteristic examples.^ 

The purpose of these letters may best be seen in the 
organization called the Guild or Company of St. George, 

1 Verulam : Lord Bacon. 

2 Ruskin's Lecture on Architecture and Painting, 1853. (Lecture III.) 

^ " Fors Clavigera, Letters to the Workmen and Laborers of Great Britain." 
[Fors: Force, Fortitude, Fortune. Clavigera: the club-bearer (Deed), the 
key-bearer (Patience), the nail-bearer (Law). See Letter IL] 



JOHN RUSK IN. xix 

established at Abbey Dale, in the vicinity of Sheffield in 
1871. 

Ruskin had long deplored the effects of competition in 
trade and labor. If not exactly the root of all social evil, 
he believed it to be at least the source of much of it. He 
saw the ever-increasing misery, squalor, and crime of the 
large towns, and the steady depopulation of the agricul- 
tural districts through the constant drift of young men to 
the cities. He saw, too, their ultimate degradation and 
despair through hopeless combat against the forces which 
crushed two out of three in order that the third might 
succeed ; and his heart was moved with compassion. 
Carlyle, seeing the same struggle, had said with grim 
irony that the only way to abolish poverty in England was 
to have a grand annual hunt, in which all well-to-do people 
should join in shooting down those who could not get on 
in the world and then barrel up the game for the support 
of the army and navy. 
^ But Ruskin, though he sat as a disciple at Carlyle's feet, 
'':ould not relieve his mind with a bitter jest. "For my 
part," said he, " I will put up with this state of things 
passively not an hour longer. I am not an unselfish per- 
son nor an evangelical one ; I have no particular pleasure 
in doing good ; neither do I dislike doing it so much as to 
expect to be rewarded for it in another world. But I sim- 
ply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do 
-anything else that I like, and the very light of the morn- 
ing sky, when there is any, — which is seldom nowadays, 
near London, — has becom.e hateful to me, because of the 
misery that I know of, and see signs of where I know it 
not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly. 
Therefore, as I have said, I will endure it no longer qui- 



XX JOHN RUSK IN. 

etly ; but henceforward, with any few or many who will 
help, do my poor best to abate this misery." This resolve 
did not evaporate in well-chosen words. Ruskin's sympa- 
thy was pocket-felt as well as heart-felt ; and on Christmas 
Day, 1871, he gave ^35,000,^ one-tenth of all he was then 
worth, to carry out his design of purchasing one or more 
tracts of land on which to plant a community which should 
begin its own regeneration and that of England. Whether 
practical and wisely planned or not, the motive at least 
was noble, and by that motive the giver if not his work 
should be judged. /It would be interesting to know how 
such a community would compare in results with that of 
the model manufacturing village of Saltaire, founded by 
Sir Titus Salt some fifty miles further north in the same 

\ shire [Yorkshire], or with that of Pullman in Illinois, built 
on a similar plan and for a like purpose, namely, the 
health, comfort, and prosperity of the men engaged in the 

' construction of the Pullman cars. It is difficult, however, 
if not impossible, to get definite statistics of Mr. Ruskin's 
experiment, which, perhaps like some other spiritual con- 
ceptions, is slow to "materialize" before the eyes of an 
unbelieving world. But the man's downright earnestness 
can no more be gainsaid on that account than could the 
Apostle Paul, when his impassioned preaching made Festus 
cry out that he was mad. 

In Ruskin's case, as in that of the Apostle to the gentiles, 
it is the madness of self-forgetfulness, bad enough doubt- 
less, but certainly not the most dangerous kind for the 
world. In fact, as one biographer has said, *' Ruskin's gen- 
erosity has been a life-long characteristic. His liberality 
at times appears to have approached prodigality, gifts 

1 He subsequently added as much more, making ^70,000 in all. 



JOHN RUSK IN. xxi 

flowing forth in fifties, hundreds, and thousands of 
pounds." Indeed, out of a fortune of nearly ^800,000 
inherited from his father, the greater part has been spent 
in endowing museums, opening art schools, establishing 
improved dwelling-houses for the poor, aiding young men 
and women to get educations, and helping the suffering ; 
so that to-day, after deducting his gift to St. George's 
Company, Mr. Ruskin has only about $60,000 left for him- 
self, or considerably less than one-twelfth of his original 
wealth. 

Yet so far from getting commendation, Ruskin has 
chiefly met mockery, which he has not infrequently re- 
turned with interest. " Because," he says, " I have passed 
my life in alms-giving, not in fortune-hunting ; because I 
have labored always for the honor of others, not of my 
own, and have chosen rather to make men look to Turner 
and Luini,^ than to form or exhibit the skill of my own 
hand ; because I have lowered my rents, arfd assured the 
comfortable lives of my poor tenants, instead of taking 
from them all I could force for the roofs they needed ; be- 
cause I love a wood walk better than a London street ; and 
would rather watch a seagull fly than shoot it, and rather 
hear a thrush sing than eat it ; finally, because I never dis- 
obeyed my mother, because I have honored all women 
with solemn worship, and have been kind even to the un- 
thankful and the evil ; therefore, the hacks of English art 
ajid literature wag their heads at me." 

But it is time to come back to St. George's Company. 

1 Luini (Bernardino) : an eminent Italian painter (pupil of Leonardo Da 
Vinci) of the latter part of the fifteenth and first of the sixteenth century. His 
principal works are at Milan. In " The Queen of the Air " Ruskin contrasts 
Luini with Turner. 



xxii JOHN RUSK IN. 

In the spring of 1877, a few Sheffield workmen hired thir- 
teen acres, at Abbey Dale, from the company at a rental 
of three per cent on cost, and the new community began 
its existence ; the understanding being that all profits 
from the cultivation of the land were to be spent in future 
improvements, and that such improvements should tend to 
lower the rental instead of increasing it, as is usually the 
case. 

Three material things are named as essential objects 
to be labored for : these are Pure Air, Water, and Earth. 
On these the master of St. George's lays especial emphasis. 
Pure air, in contrast to that of manufacturing towns, black 
with irritating coal-smoke and poisonous with chemical 
gases ; Pure water, as opposed to streams so reeking with 
filth and refuse that they have become simply open sew- 
ers ; ^ Pure earth, as compared with soil trampled deep 
with coal ashes, and heaped with broken pottery, cinders, 
and slag. Next, three immaterial things : Admiration, 
Hope, and Love. " Admiration — the power of discerning 
and taking delight in what is beautiful in visible form, and 
lovely in human character. Hope — the recognition, by 
true foresight, of better things to be reached hereafter, 
whether by ourselves or others. Love, both of family and 
neighbors, faithful and satisfied." 

With these essentials to start with, says Ruskin, "we 
will try to make some small piece of English ground beau- 
tiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steam-en- 
gines upon it, and no railroads ; we will have no untended 
or unthought-of creatures on it ; none wretched but the 

1 Pure water : the once beautiful streams of rural England are now evil- 
looking and evil-smelling. Not long ago a woman fell into one of them and 
was shortly after taken out dead; not drowned, but poisoned ! 



JOHN RUSK IN. Xxiii 

sick ; none idle but the dead. We will have no liberty 
upon it ; but instant obedience to known law and appointed 
persons : no equality upon it ; but recognition of every 
betterness that we can find, and reprobation of every 
worseness. When we want to go anywhere, we will go 
there quietly and safely, not at forty miles an hour, in the 
risk of our lives ; when we want to carry anything any- 
where, we will carry it either on the backs of beasts, or on 
our own, or in carts or boats ; we will have plenty of flow- 
ers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass 
in our fields, — and few bricks." 

"... Whatever piece of land we begin work upon we 
shall treat thoroughly at once, putting unlimited manual 
labor on it until we have every foot of it under as strict 
care as a flower garden : and the laborers shall be paid 
sufficient, unchanging wages ; and their children educated 
in agricultural schools inland, and naval schools by the sea, 
the indispensable first condition of such education being 
that the boys learn either to ride or to sail, the girls to 
spin, weave, and sew, and at a proper age to cook all ordi- 
nary food exquisitely ; the youths of both sexes to be dis- 
ciplined daily in the strictest practice of vocal music ; and 
for morality, to be taught gentleness to all brute creatures, 
finished courtesy to each other, to speak truth with rigid 
care, and to obey orders with the precision of slaves. 
Then, as they grow older, they are to learn the natural 
history of the place they live in ; to know Latin, boys and 
girls both, and the history of five cities, — Athens, Rome, 
Venice, Florence, and London." 

"... In the history of the five cities I have named, 
they shall learn, so far as they can understand, what has 
been beautifully and bravely done ; and they shall know 



xxiv JOHN RUSK IN. 

the lives of the heroes and heroines, in truth and natural- 
ness ; and shall be taught to remember the greatest of 
them on the days of their birth and death, so that the 
year shall have its full calendar of reverent memory. And 
on every day part of their morning service shall be a song 
in honor of the hero whose birthday it is, and part of the 
evening service a song of triumph for the fair death of one 
whose birthday it is ; and in their first learning of notes 
they shall be taught the great purpose of music, which is 
to say a thing that you mean deeply, in the strongest and 
clearest possible way ; and they shall never be taught to 
sing what they don't mean. They shall be able to sing 
merrily when they are happy, and earnestly when they are 
sad." 

"... And these things are to be done not by competi- 
tive examination, but under absolute prohibition of all 
violent and strained effort — most of all envious or anx- 
ious effort — in any exercise of body and mind, each one 
keeping these principles always in view : 

" I. To do your own work well, whether it be for life or 
death. 

"II. To help other people at theirs, when you can, and 
seek to avenge no injury. 

"III. To be sure you can obey good laws before you 
seek to alter bad ones." 

Such, on the verge of his seventieth year, is John Rus- 
kin's ideal of what England should aim at. Whether he 
is partly right or altogether wrong is for the reader to 
judge. 

That he has the courage to grapple with such a prob- 
lem proves at least that he, for one, is resolved to do his 
part. He finds men, as he believes, slaves to machines, 



JOHN RUSK IN. ■ XXV 

slaves to a heartless system of cut-throat competition, 
slaves to a joyless routine of mechanical labor, divided 
and subdivided until there are no entire workmen to be 
found, but only fractions, '' so that all the little piece of 
intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a 
pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a 
pin, or the head of a nail." 

His object is to lift the artisans of England out of their 
bondage and degradation, both for their own good and for 
the welfare and safety of the state. Whether we agree 
with him in any degree or not, no one can see ''that spare, 
stooping figure, with rough-hewn kindly face, and clear 
deep eyes," still less can one hear his earnest unstudied 
eloquence of speech, without being drawn into sympathy 
with the man, though at the same time we cannot help 
regretting that Ruskin, like Hamlet,^ has felt called to 
take up a task so perilous — not, indeed, too great for his 
generous purpose, but utterly beyond his saddened heart 
and failing strength. 

D. H. M. 

1 "The time is out of joint : — O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right ! " 

— Hamlety Act I. Scene 5. 



BOOKS AND READING/ 

FIRST LECTURE. 

HOWEVER good you may be, you have faults ; how- 
ever dull you may be. you can find out what some of 
them are ; and however slight they may be, you had better 
make some — not too painful, but patient — effort to get 
quit of them. And so far as you have confidence in me at 
all, trust me for this, that how many soever you may find or 
fancy your faults to be, there are only two that are of real 
consequence — Idleness and Cruelty. Perhaps you may be 
proud. Well, we can get much good out of pride, if only 
it be not religious. Perhaps you may be vain : it is highly 
probable ; and very pleasant for the people who like to 
praise you. Perhaps you are a little envious : that is 
really very shocking ; but then — so is everybody else. 
Perhaps, also, you are a little malicious, which I am truly 
concerned to hear, but should probably only the more, if 
I knew you, enjoy your conversation. But whatever else 
you may be, you must not be useless, and you must not 
be cruel. If there is any one point which, in six thousand 
years of thinking about right and wrong, wise and good 
men have agreed upon, or successively by experience dis- 
covered, it is that God dislikes idle and cruel people more 

1 From "Sesame* and Lilies" (Preface). 

* Sesame is a kind of grain used in the East for food, but here it means a talisman or 
magic word which opens the doors of locked treasure-houses — royal treasure-houses of 
knowledge and thought. 



2 JOHN RUSK IN. 

than any other; — that His first order is, ''Work while 
you have Hght " ; and His second, '' Be merciful while you 
have mercy." 

*' Work while you have light," especially while you have 
the light of morning. There are few things more wonder- 
ful to me than that old people never tell young ones how 
precious their youth is. They sometimes sentimentally 
regret their own earlier days ; sometimes prudently forget 
them ; often foolishly rebuke the young, often more fool- 
ishly indulge, often most foolishly thwart and restrain ; 
but scarcely ever warn or watch them. Remember, then, 
that I, at least, have warned yon, that the happiness of 
your life, and its power, and its part and rank on earth or 
in heaven, depend on the way you pass your days now. 
They are not to be sad days ; far from that, the first duty 
of young people is to be delighted and delightful ; but 
they are to be in the deepest sense solemn days. There 
is no solemnity so deep, to a rightly-thinking creature, as 
that of dawn. But not only in that beautiful sense, but 
in all' their character and method, they are to be solemn 
days. Take your Latin dictionary, and look out " sollen- 
nis," ^ and fix the sense of the word well in your mind, 
and remember that every day of your early life is ordain- 
ing irrevocably, for good or evil, the custom and practice 
of your soul ; ordaining either sacred customs of dear and 
lovely recurrence, or trenching deeper and deeper the fur- 
rows for seed of sorrow. Now, therefore, see that no day 
passes in which you do not make yourself a somewhat 

1 Sollennis (from sollus, the whole, and annus, year) : — 

1. Yearly; hence relating to appointed yearly solemnities 

2. A solemn custom. 

3. Usual, customary, habitual, 



BOOKS AND READING. 3 

better creature ; and in order to do that, find out, first, 
what you are now. Do not think vaguely about it ; take 
pen and paper, and write down as accurate a description 
of yourself as you can, with the date to it. If you dare 
not do so, find out why you dare not, and try to get 
strength of heart enough to look yourself fairly in the 
face, in mind as well as body. I do not doubt but that 
the mind is a less pleasant thing to look at than the face, 
and for that very reason it needs more looking at ; so 
always have two mirrors on your toilet table, and see that 
with proper care you dress body and mind before them 
daily. After the dressing is once over for the day, think 
no more about it : as your hair will blow about your ears, 
so your temper and thoughts will get ruffled with the 
day's work, and may need, sometimes, twice dressing ; 
but I don't want you to carry about a mental pocket- 
comb ; only to be smooth braided always in the morning. 
Write down then, frankly, what you are, or, at least, 
what you think yourself, not dwelling upon those inevi- 
table faults which I have just told you are of little con- 
sequence, and which the action of a right life will shake 
or smooth away ; but that you may determine to the best 
of your intelligence what you are good for, and can be 
made into. You will find that the mere resolve not to be 
useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, 
in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.} In 
music especially you will soon find what personal benefit 
there is in being serviceable : it is probable that, however 
limited your powers, you have voice and ear enough to 
sustain a note of moderate compass in a concerted piece ; 
— that, then, is the first thing to make sure you can do. 
Get your voice disciplined and clear, and think only of 



4 JOHN RUSK IN. 

accuracy ; never of effect or expression : if you have any 
soul worth expressing it will show itself in your singing ; 
but most likely there are very few feelings in you, at 
present, needing any particular expression ; and the one 
thing you have to do is to make a clear-voiced little instru- 
ment of yourself, which other people can entirely depend 
upon for the note wanted. So, in drawing, as soon as you 
can set down the right shape of anything, and thereby 
explain its character to another person, or make the look 
of it clear and interesting to a child, you will begin to 
enjoy the art vividly for its own sake, and all your habits 
of mind and powers of memory will gain precision : but if 
you only try to make showy drawings for praise, or petty 
ones for amusement, your drawing will have little of real 
interest for you, and no educational power whatever. 
(Then, besides this more delicate work, resolve to do 
every day some that is useful in the vulgar sense. Learn 
first thoroughly the economy of the kitchen ; the good 
and bad qualities of every common article of food, and 
the simplest and best modes of their preparation. 

You must be to the best of your strength usefully em- 
ployed during the greater part of the day, so that you may 
be able at the end of it to say, as proudly as any peasant, 
that you have not eaten the bread of idleness. Then, 
secondly, I said, you are not to be cruel. Perhaps you 
think there is no chance of your being so ; and indeed I 
hope it is not likely that you should be deliberately unkind 
to any creature ; but unless you are deliberately kind to 
every creature, you will often be cruel to many. 

Observe, therefore, carefully in this matter : there are 
degrees of pain, as degrees of faultfulness, which are alto- 
gether conquerable, and which seem to be merely forms of 



BOOKS AND READING. 



5 



wholesome trial or discipline. Your fingers tingle when 
you go out on a frosty morning, and are all the warmer 
afterwards ; your limbs are weary with wholesome work, 
and lie down in the pleasanter rest ; you are tried for a 
little while by having to wait for some promised good, and 
it is all the sweeter when it comes. But you cannot carry 
the trial past a certain point. Let the cold fasten on your 
hand in an extreme degree, and your fingers will moulder 
from their sockets. Fatigue yourself, but once, to utter 
exhaustion, and to the end of life you shall not recover the 
former vigor of your frame. Let heart -sickness pass be- 
yond a certain bitter point, and the heart loses its life for- 
ever. / 

Now, the very definition of evil is in this irremediable- 
ness. It means sorrow, or sin, which ends in death ; and 
assuredly, as far as we know, or can conceive, there are 
many conditions both of pain and sin which cannot but 
so end. Of course we are ignorant and blind creatures, 
and we cannot know what seeds of good may be in present 
suffering, or present crime ; but with what we cannot 
know, we are not concerned. It is conceivable that mur- 
derers and liars may in some distant world be exalted into 
a higher humanity than they could have reached without 
homicide or falsehood ; but the contingency is not one by 
which our actions should be guided. There is, indeed, a 
better hope that the beggar, who lies at our gates in 
misery, may, within gates of pearl be comforted ; but the 
Master, whose words are our only authority for thinking 
so, never Himself inflicted disease as a blessing, nor sent 
away the hungry unfed, or the wounded unhealed. 
( Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, 
we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless 



6 JOHN RUSKIN. 

books ; and valuable books should, in a civilized country, 
be within the reach of every one, printed in excellent 
form, for a just price; but not in any vile, vulgar, or, by 
reason of smallness of type, physically injurious form, at 
a vile price. For we none of us need many books, and 
those which we need ought to be clearly printed, on the 
best paper, and strongly bound. And though we are, 
indeed, now, a wretched and poverty-stricken nation, and 
hardly able to keep soul and body together, still, as no 
person in decent circumstances would put on his table 
confessedly bad wine, or bad meat, without being ashamed, 
so he need not have on his shelves ill-printed or loosely 
and wretchedly stitched books. I would urge upon every 
young man, as the beginning of his due and wise provision 
for his household, to obtain as soon as he can, by the 
severest economy, a restricted, serviceable, and steadily — 
however slowly — increasing, series of books for use through 
life ; making his little library, of all the furniture in his 
room, the most studied and decorative piece ; every volume 
having its assigned place, like a little statue in its niche, 
and one of the earliest and strictest lessons to the children 
of the house being how to turn the pages of their own 
literary possessions lightly and deliberately, with no chance 
of tearing or dogs' ears. ) 

Now,i I want to speak to you about the way we read 
books, or could, or should read them. A grave subject, 
you will say ; and a wide one ! Yes ; so wide that I 
shall make no effort to touch the compass of it. I 
will try only to bring before you a few simple thoughts 
about reading, which press themselves upon me every 
day more deeply, as I watch the course of the public 

1 From "Sesame and Lilies" (Sesame — Kings' Treasuries). 



BOOKS AND READING. 7 

mind with respect to our daily enlarging means of educa- 
tion, and the answeringly wider spreading, on the levels, 
of the irrigation of literature. It happens that I have 
practically some connection with schools for different 
classes of youth ; and I receive many letters from parents 
respecting the education of tlfbir children. In the mass 
of these letters, I am always struck by the precedence 
which the idea of a "position in life" takes above all 
other thoughts in the parents' — more especially in the 
mothers' — minds. " The education befitting such and 
such a station in life'' — this is the phrase, this the ob- 
ject, always. They never seek, as far as I can make out, an 
education good in itself : the conception of abstract right- 
ness in training rarely seems reached by the writers. But 
an education " which shall keep a good coat on my son's 
back ; an education which shall enable him to ring with 
confidence the visitors' bell at double-belled doors ; ^ — 
education which shall result ultimately in establishment of 
a double-belled door to his own house ; in a word, which 
shall lead to 'advancement in life.' " It never seems to 
occur to the parents that there may be an education which, 
in itself, is advancement in Life ; — that any other than 
that may perhaps be advancement in Death ; and that this 
essential education might be more easily got, or given, 
than they fancy, if they set about it in the right way ; 
while it is for no price, and by no favor, to be got, if they 
set about it in the wrong. 

Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective in 

1 Double-belled doors : many first-class London houses have double 
bells; one for visitors, the other for persons calling on business. In addition, 
there is a basement bell for the use of servants, provision-dealers, and the 
like. 



8 JOHN RUSK IN. 

the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the first, 
at least that which is confessed with the greatest frank- 
ness, and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful 
exertion — is this of ''advancement in life." My main 
purpose this evening is to determine, with you, what this 
idea practically includes, and what it should include. 

Practically, then, at present, " advancement in life " 
means becoming conspicuous in life ; — obtaining a posi- 
tion which shall be acknowledged by others to be respec- 
table or honorable. We do not understand by this ad- 
vancement, in general, the mere making of money, but 
the being known to have made it ; not the accomplish- 
ment of any great aim, but the being seen to have accom- 
plished it. In a word, we mean the gratification of our 
thirst for applause. That thirst, if the last infirmity of 
noble minds, is also the first infirmity of weak ones ; and, 
on the whole, the strongest impulsive influence of average 
humanity : the greatest efforts of the race have always 
been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catas- 
trophes to the love of pleasure. 

I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I want 
you only to feel how it lies at the root of effort ; espe- 
cially of all modern effort. It is the gratification of vanity 
which is, with us, the stimulus of toil, and balm of repose ; 
so closely does it touch the very springs of life, that the 
wounding of our vanity is always spoken of (and truly) as 
in its measure mortal; we call it "mortification," using 
the same expression which we should apply to a gangre- 
nous and incurable bodily hurt. And although few of us 
may be physicians enough to recognize the various effect 
of this passion upon health and energy, I believe most 
honest men know and would at once acknowledge, its 



BOOKS AND READING. 9 

leading power with them as a motive. The seaman does 
not commonly desire to be made captain only because he 
knows he can manage the ship better than any other 
sailor on board. He wants to be made captain that he 
may be called captain. The clergyman does not usually 
want to be made a bishop only because he believes no 
other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the diocese through 
its difficulties. He wants .to be made bishop primarily 
that he may be called "My Lord."^ And a prince does 
not usually desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a king- 
dom, because he believes that no one else can as well 
serve the state upon the throne ; but, briefly, because he 
wishes to be addressed as "Your Majesty," by as many 
lips as may be brought to such utterance. 

This, then, being the main idea of advancement in life, 
the force of it applies, for all of us, according to our 
station, particularly to that secondary result of such ad- 
vancement which we call " getting into good society." 
We want to get into good society, not that we may have 
it, but that we may be seen in it ; and our notion of its 
goodness depends primarily on its conspicuousness. 

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put 
what I fear you may think an impertinent question t 
I never can go on with an address unless I feel, or know, 
that my audience are either with me or against me : (I do 
not much care which, in beginning;) but I must know 
where they are; and I would fain find out, at this instant, 
whether you think I am putting the motives of popular 
action too low. I am resolved to-night, to state them low 
enough to be admitted as probable ; for whenever, in my 

1 " My Lord " : as a bishop of the Church of England is a peer and holds 
a seat in the House of Lords, he has the title of "lord." 



lO JOHN RUSK IN. 

writings on Political Economy, I assume that a little hon- 
esty, or generosity, — or what used to be called "virtue" 

— may be calculated upon as a human motive of action, 
people always answer me, saying, "You must not calcu- 
late on that : that is not in human nature : you must not 
assume anything to be common to men but acquisitive- ' 
ness and jealousy ; no other feeling ever has influence on 
them, except accidentally, and in matters out of the way of 
business." 1 begin accordingly to-night low down in the 
scale of motives ; but I must know if you think me right 
in doing so. Therefore, let me ask those who admit the 
love of praise to be usually the strongest motive in men's 
minds in seeking advancement, and the honest desire of 
doing any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to 
hold up their hands. {About a dozen of hands held iLp — 
the audience partly not being sure the lecturer is serious, 
and partly shy of expressing opinion}) I am quite serious 

— I really do want to know what you think; however, I 
can judge by putting the reverse question. Will those 
who think that duty is generally the first, and love of 
praise the second motive, hold up their hands t {One hand 
reported to have been held ///, behind the lecturer}) Very 
good ; I see you are with me, and that you think I have 
not begun too near the ground. Now, without teasing 
you by putting farther question, I venture to assume that 
you will admit duty as at least a secondary or tertiary ^ 
motive. You think that the desire of doing something 
useful, or obtaining some real good, is indeed an existent 
collateral idea, though a secondary one, in most men's 
desire of advancement. You will grant that moderately 
honest men desire place and office, at least in some meas- 

1 Tertiary : third in order. 



BOOKS AND READING. II 

lire, for the sake of their beneficent power ; and would 
wish to associate rather with sensible and well-informed 
persons than with fools and ignorant persons, whether 
they are seen in the company of the sensible ones or not. 
And finally, without being troubled by repetition of any 
common truisms about the preciousness of friends, and 
the influence of companions, you will admit, doubtless, 
that according to the sincerity of our desire that our 
friends may be true, and our companions wise, — and in 
proportion to the earnestness and discretion with which 
we choose both, will be the general chances of our happi- 
ness and usefulness. 

But, granting that we had both the will and the sense 
to choose our friends well, how few of us have the power ! 
or, at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice ! 
Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or 
necessity ; and restricted within a narrow circle. We can- 
not know whom we would ; and those whom we know, we 
cannot have at our side when we most need them. All 
the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those 
beneath, only momentarily and partially open. We may, 
by good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and 
hear the sound of his voice ; or put a question to a man 
of science, and be answered good-humoredly. We may 
intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet minister, answered 
probably with words worse than silence, being deceptive ; 
or snatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of 
throwing a bouquet in the path of a Princess, or arresting 
the kind glance of a Queen. And yet these momentary 
chances we covet ; and spend our years, and passions, and 
powers in pursuit of little more than these : while, mean- 
time, there is a society continually open to us, of people 



12 JOHN RUSKIN. 

who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank 
or occupation ; — talk to us in the best words they can 
choose, and with thanks if we listen to them. And this 
society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, — and 
can be kept waiting round us all day long, not to grant 
audience, but to gain it ; — kings and statesmen lingering 
patiently in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, 
our^boqkcase shelves, — we make no account of that com- 
pany, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all 
day long ! 

You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, 
that the apathy with which we regard this company of 
the noble, who are praying us to listen to them, and the 
passion with which we pursue the company, probably of 
the ignoble, who despise us, or have nothing to teach us, 
are grounded in this, — that we can see the faces of the 
living men, and it is themselves, and not their sayings, 
with which we desire to become familiar. But it is not so. 
Suppose you never were to see their faces ; — suppose you 
could be put behind a screen in the statesman's cabinet, 
or the prince's chamber, would you not be glad to listen to 
their words, though you were forbidden to advance beyond 
the screen } And when the screen is only a little less, 
folded in two, instead of four, and you can be hidden 
behind the cover of the two boards that bind a book, and 
listen, all day long, not to the casual talk, but to the 
studied, determined, chosen addresses of the wisest of 
men ; — this station of audience, and honorable privy 
council, you despise ! 
/ But perhaps you will say that it is because the living 
I people talk of things that are passing, and are of imme- 
diate interest to you, that you desire to hear them. Nay ; 



BOOKS AND READING. I3 

that cannot be so, for the living people will themselves 
tell you about passing matters much better in their writ- 
ings than in their careless talk. But I admit that this 
motive does influence you, so far as you prefer those rapid 
and ephemeral writings to slow and enduring writings — 
books, properly so called. For all books are divisible into 
two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all 
time. Mark this distinction — it is not one of quality 
only. It is not merely the bad book that does not last, 
and the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. 
There are good books for the hour, and good ones for all 
time ; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time. 
I must define the two kinds before I go farther. 

The good book of the hour, then, — I do not speak of 
the bad ones — is simply the useful or pleasant talk of 
some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, 
printed for you. Very useful often, telling you what you 
need to know ; very pleasant often, as a sensible friend's 
present talk would be. These bright accounts of travels ; 
good-humored and witty discussions of question ; lively or 
pathetic story-telling in the form of novel ; firm fact-telling, 
by the real agents concerned in the events of passing 
history; — all these books of the hour, multiplying among 
us as education becomes more general, are a peculiar char- 
acteristic and possession of the present age ; we ought to 
be entirely thankful for them, and entirely ashamed of our- 
selves if we make no good use of them. But we make the 
worst possible use, if we allow them to usurp the place 
of true books : for, strictly speaking, they are not books 
at all, but merely letters or newspapers in good print. 
Our friend's letter may be delightful or necessary to-day : 
whether worth keeping or not, is to be considered. The 



14 JOHN RUSKIN. 

newspaper may be entirely proper at breakfast time, but 
assuredly it is not reading for all day. So, though bound 
up in a volume, the long letter which gives you so pleasant 
an account of the inns, and roads, and weather last year at 
such a place, or which tells you that amusing story, or 
gives you the real circumstances of such and such events, 
however valuable for occasional reference, may not be, in 
the real sense of the word, a " book " at all, nor, in the 
real sense, to be " read." A book is essentially not a 
talked thing, but a written thing ; and written, not with 
the view of mere communication, but of permanance. 
The book of talk is printed only because its author cannot 
speak to thousands of people at once ; if he could, he 
would — the volume is mere multiplication of his voice. 
You cannot talk to your friend in India ; if you could, you 
would ; you write instead : that is mere conveyance of voice. 
But a book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, 
not to carry it merely, but to preserve it. The author has 
something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, 
or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one has yet 
said it ; so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is 
bound to say it, clearly and melodiously if he may ; clearly, 
at all events. In the sum of his life he finds this to be the 
thing, or group of things, manifest to him ; — this the piece 
of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine 
and earth has permitted him to seize. He would fain set 
it down for ever ; engrave it on rock, if he could ; saying, 
" This is the best of me ; for the rest, I ate, and drank, 
and slept, loved, and hated, like another ; my life was as 
the vapor, and is not ; but this T saw and knew : this, if 
anything of mine, is worth your memory." That is his 
*' writing " ; it is, in his small human way, and with what- 



BOOKS AND READING. 1 5 

ever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription or 
scripture. That is a " Book." 

Perhaps you think no books were ever so written } 
But, again I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, 
or at all in kindness t or do you think there is never any 
honesty or benevolence in wise people ? None of us, I 
hope, are so unhappy as to think that. Well, whatever bit 
of a wise man's work is honestly and benevolently done, 
that bit is his book, or his piece of art. It is mixed always 
with evil fragments — ill-done, redundant, affected work. 
But if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true 
bits, and those are the book. 

Now books of this kind have been written in all ages by 
their greatest men; — by great leaders, great statesmen, 
and great thinkers. These are all at your choice ; and life 
is short. You have heard as much before; — yet have you 
measured and mapped out this short life and its possibili- 
ties } Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read 
that — that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-mor- 
row } Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or 
your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and 
kings ; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy 
consciousness of your own claims to respect that you 
jostle with the common crowd for eiitr^e^ here, and audi- 
ence there, when all the while this eternal court is open to 
you, with its society wide as the world, multitudinous as 
its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of every place and 
time .-* Into that you may enter always ; in that you may 
take fellowship and rank according to your wish ; from 
that, once entered into it, you can never be outcast but 
by your own fault ; by your aristocracy of companionship 

1 Entree : entrance, adniis^on. 



1 6 JOHN RUSK IN. 

there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly 
tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high 
place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the 
truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you 
desire to take in this company of the Dead. 

'' The place you desire," and the place you fit yourself 
for, I must also say ; because, observe, this court of the 
past differs from all living aristocracy in this : — it is open 
to labor and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will 
bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian 
of those Elysian ^ gates. In the deep sense, no vile or vul- 
gar person ever enters there. At the portieres ^ of that 
silent Faubourg St. Germain,^ there is but brief question, 
" Do you deserve to enter } " '' Pass. Do you ask to be 
the companion of nobles } Make yourself noble, and you 
shall be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise } 
Learn to understand it, and you shall hear it. But on 
other terms .^ — no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot 
stoop to you. The living lord may assume courtesy, the 
living philosopher explain his thought to you with consid- 
erable pain ; but here we neither feign nor interpret ; you 
must rise to the level of our thoughts if you would be glad- 
dened by them, and share our feelings, if you would recog- 
nize our presence." 

This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that it is 
much. You must, in a word, love these people, if you are 

1 Elysian : pertaining to Elysium, the name given by the Greeks to the 
abode of the blessed after death. In Paris, the Elysian Fields is a fashionable 
quarter of the city. 

2 Portieres : here, doors or gates to mansions, for the use of carriages, 

^ Faubourg St. Germain (Fo'boor San Zhayr'man) : a part of Paris in 
which the nobility formerly resided. It is still the favorite quarter with their 
descendants. 



BOOKS AND READING. 1 7 

to be among them. No ambition is of any use. They 
scorn your ambition. You must love tliem, and show your 
love in these two following ways. 

I. First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and to 
enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe ; 
not to find your own expressed by them. If the person 
who wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not 
read it ; if he be, he will think differently from you in 
many respects. 

Very ready we are to say of a book, '' How good this is 
— that's exactly what I think!" But the right feeling is, 
" How strange that is ! I never thought of that before, 
and yet I see it is true ; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, 
some day." But whether thus submissively or not, at least 
be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, 
not to find yours. Judge it afterwards, if you think your- 
self qualified to do so ; but ascertain it first. And be sure 
also, if the author is worth anything, that you will not get 
at his meaning all at once ; — nay, that at his whole mean- 
ing you will not for a long time arrive in any wise. Not 
that he does not say what he means, and in strong words 
too : but he cannot say it all ; and what is more strange, 
will not, but in a hidden way and in parables, in order that 
he may be sure you want it. I cannot quite see the reason 
of this, nor analyze that cruel reticence in the breasts of 
wise men which makes them always hide their deeper 
thought. They do not give it to you by way of help, but 
of reward,, and will make themselves sure that you deserve 
it before they allow you to reach it. But it is the same 
with the physical type of wisdom, gold. There seems, to 
you and me, no reason why the electric forces of the earth 
should not carry whatever there is of gold within it at once 



1 8 JOHN RUSK IN. 

to the mountain tops, so that kings and people might know 
that all the gold they could get was there ; and without 
any trouble of digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of 
time, cut it away, and coin as much as they needed. But 
Nature does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures 
in the earth, nobody knows where : you may dig long and 
find none ; you must dig painfully to find any. 
\J And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. When 
you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, '' Am I 
inclined to work as an Australian miner would } Are my 
pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim 
myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath 
good, and my temper t " And, keeping the figure a little 
longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly 
useful one, the metal you are in search of being the author's 
mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have 
to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pick- 
axes are your own care, wit, and learning ; your smelting- 
furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get 
at any good author's meaning without those tools and that 
fire ; often you will need sharpest, finest chiselling, and 
patientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the 
metal. 
^ And, therefore, first of all, I tell you, earnestly and 
authoritatively, (I know I am right in this,) you must get 
into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring 
yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable — nay, letter 
by letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposi- 
tion of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in func-. 
tion of signs, that the study ot books is called ''literature," 
and that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of 
nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of 



BOOKS AND READING. 



19 



words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomen- 
clature 1 this real principle ; — that you might read all the 
books in the British Museum (if you could live long 
enough), and remain an utterly "illiterate," uneducated 
person ; but that if you read ten pages of a good book, 
letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy, — you 
are for evermore in some measure an educated person. 
The entire difference between education and non-education 
(as regards the merely intellectual part of it), consists in 
this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman may not know 
many languages, — may not be able to speak any but his 
own, — may have read very few books. But whatever lan- 
guage he knows, he knows precisely ; whatever word he 
pronounces, he pronounces rightly ; above all, he is learned 
in the peerage of words ; knows the words of true descent 
and ancient blood at a glance, from words of modern 
canaille^; remembers all their ancestry — their intermar- 
riages, distantest relationships, and the extent to which 
they were admitted, and offices they held, among the 
national noblesse ^ of words at any time, and in any coun- 
try. But an uneducated person may know by memory any 
number of languages, and talk them all, and yet truly 
know not a word of any, — not a word even of his own. 
An ordinarily clever ^ and sensible seaman will be able to' 
make his way ashore at most ports ; yet he has only to 
speak a sentence of any language to be known for an illit- 
erate person : so also the accent, or turn of expression of 
a single sentence will at once mark a scholar. And this 
is so strongly felt, so conclusively admitted by educated 
persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is 

^ Nomenclature : system of names. ^ Noblesse : nobility. 

2 Canaille: the rabble. ^ Clever: capable, skilful. 



20 JOHN RUSKIN. 

enough, in the parliament of any civiUzed nation, to assign 
to a man a certain degree of inferior standing for ever. 
And this is right ; but it is a pity that the accuracy in- 
sisted on is not greater, and required to a serious purpose. 
It is right that a false Latin quantity should excite a smile 
in the House of Commons ; but it is wrong that a false 
English meaning should }iot excite a frown there. Let the 
accent of words be watched, by all means, but let their 
meaning be watched more closely still, and fewer will do 
the work. A few words well chosen and well distinguished, 
will do work that a thousand cannot, when every one is 
acting, equivocally, in the function of another. Yes ; and 
words, if they are not watched, will do deadly work some- 
times. There are masked words droning and skulking 
about us in Europe just now, — (there never were so many, 
owing to the spread of a shallow, blotching, blundering, 
infectious "information," or rather deformation, every- 
where, and to the teaching of catechisms and phrases at 
schools instead of human meanings) — there are masked 
words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, but which 
everybody uses, and rhost people will also fight for, live 
for, or even die for, fancying they mean this, or that, or 
the other, of things dear to them : for such words wear 
chamseleon^ cloaks — "groundlion " cloaks, of the color of 
the ground of any man's fancy : on that ground they lie in 
wait, and rend him with a spring from it. There were 
never creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists 
so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as these masked 
words; they are the unjust stewards of all men's ideas: 
whatever fancy or favorite instinct a man most cherishes, 

1 Chamaeleon (ground-lion) : a kind of lizard which has the power of 
changing its color so as to harmonize with that of its surroundings. 



BOOKS AND READING. 21 

he ofives to his favorite masked word to take care of for 
him ; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over 
him, — you cannot get at him but by its ministry. And in 
languages so mongrel in breed as the English, there is a 
fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, almost 
whether they will or no, in being able to use Greek or 
Latin forms for a word when they want it to be respecta- 
ble, and Saxon or otherwise common forms when they want 
to discredit it. What a singular and salutary effect, for 
instance, would be produced on the minds of people who 
are in the habit of taking the Form of the words they live 
by, for the Power of which those words tell them, if we 
always either retained, or refused, the Greek form "bib- 
los," or "biblion," as the right expression for "book" — 
instead of employing it only in the one instance in which 
we wish to give dignity to the idea, and translating it 
everywhere else. How wholesome it would be for the 
many simple persons who worship the Letter of God's 
Word instead of its Spirit, (just as other idolaters worship 
His picture instead of His presence,) if, in such places, for 
instance, as Acts xix. 19 we retained the Greek expression, 
instead of translating it, and they had to read — '' Many of 
them also which used curious arts, brought their Bibles 
together, and burnt them before all men ; and they 
counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand 
pieces of silver ! " Or if, on the other hand, we translated 
instead of retaining it, and always spoke of " The Holy 
Book," instead of " Holy Bible," it might come into more 
heads than it does at present that the Word of God, by 
which the heavens were, of old, and by which they are now 
kept in store,* ^ cannot be made a present of to anybody in 

* 2 Peter iii. 5-7. 1 In store: here, preserved. 



22 JOHN RUSK IN. 

morocco binding ; nor sown on any wayside by help either 
of steam plough or steam press ; but is nevertheless being 
offered to us daily, and by us with contumely ^ refused ; 
and sown in us daily, and by us as instantly as may be, 
choked. 

And divisions in the mind of Europe, which have cost 
seas of blood, and in the defence of which the noblest souls 
of men have been cast away in frantic desolation, countless 
as forest leaves — though, in the heart of them, founded on 
deeper causes — have nevertheless been rendered practica- 
bly possible, namely, by the European adoption of the 
Greek word^ for a public meeting, to give peculiar respec- 
tability to such meetings, when held for religious purposes; 
and other collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar Eng- 
lish one of using the word "priest" as a contraction for 
"presbyter."^ 

Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the habit 
you must form. Nearly every word in your language has 
been first a word of some other language — of Saxon, Ger- 
man, French, Latin, or Greek (not to speak of eastern and 
primitive dialects).* And many words have been all these ; 
— that is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, French 
or German next, and English last: undergoing a certain 
change of sense and use on the lips of each nation ; but 
retaining a deep vital meaning which all good scholars feel 
in employing them, even at this day. If you do not know 
the Greek alphabet, learn it ; young or old — girl or boy — 
whoever you may be, if you think of reading seriously 

1 Contumely : haughty contempt. 

2 Greek word : synod would seem to be the word alluded to here. 

3 Presbyter: i. An elder; one who had authority in the early Christian 
church. 2. A priest, parson, or pastor. 

* Dialects : forms of speech. 



BOOKS AND READING. 23 

(which, of course, implies that you have some leisure at 
command), learn your Greek alphabet ; then get good dic- 
tionaries of all these languages, and whenever you are in 
doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max 
Miiller's^ lectures thoroughly, to begin with; and, after 
that, never let a word escape you that looks suspicious. 
It is severe work ; but you will find it, even at first, inter- 
esting, and at last, endlessly amusing. And the general 
gain to your character, in power and precision, will be quite 
incalculable. 

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, 
Greek, or Latin, or French. It takes a whole life to learn 
any language perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the 
meanings through which the English word has passed ; and 
those which in a good writer's work it must still bear. 

And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with your 
permission, read a few lines of a true book with you, care- 
fully ; and see what will come out of them. I will take a 
book perfectly known to you all. No English words are 
more familiar to us, yet nothing perhaps has been less read 
with sincerity. I will take these few following lines of 
Lycidas : — 

" Last came, and last did go, 
The pilot of the Galilean lake ; 
Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, 
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain), ^ 
He shook his mitred ^ locks, and stern bespake, 
How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain, 
Enow* of such as for their bellies' sake 

1 Mtiller (pronounced ahnost like miller) : a distinguished German scholar, 
formerly professor of modern languages at Oxford. 
■^ Amain : firmly, forcibly. 

3 Mitred : wearing a mitre, or bishop's tall, pointed cap. 
* Enow : enough. 



24 JOHN RUSK IN. 

Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold ! 

Of other care they little reckoning make, 

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 

And shove away the worthy bidden guest ; 

Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 

A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else, the least 

That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs ! 

What recks it them? ^ What need they? They are sped ; ^ 

And when they list,^ their lean and flashy '^ songs 

Grate on their scrannel ^ pipes ^ of wretched straw ; 

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 

But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ; 

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 

Daily devours apace, and nothing said." 

Let us think over this passage, and examine its words. 

First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to St. 
Peter, not only his full episcopaF function, but the very 
types of it which Protestants usually refuse most passion- 
ately.-* His "mitred" locks ! Milton was no Bishop-lover; 
how comes St. Peter to be "mitred"? "Two massy keys 
he bore." Is this, then, the power of the keys claimed by 
the Bishops of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Mil- 
ton only in a poetical license, for the sake of its picturesque- 
ness, that he may get the gleam of the golden keys to help 
his effect t Do not think it. Great men do not play stage 
tricks with doctrines of life and death : only little men do 

1 What recks it them ? : What care they? 

2 Sped : provided for. 
^ List: choose. 

* Flashy : here, spiritless, dvdl. 
° Scrannel : poor, miserable. 
^ Pipe : a kind of flute or fife. 

■^ Episcopal : relating to the office of a bishop or to church government by 
bishops. 



BOOKS AND READING. 2$ 

that. Milton means what he says ; and means it with his 
might too — is going to put the whole strength of his spirit 
presently into the saying of it. For though not a lover of 
false bishops, he zuas a lover of true ones ; and the Lake- 
pilot is here, in his thoughts, the type and head of true 
episcopal power. For Milton reads that text, '' I will give 
unto thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven,"^ quite 
honestly. Puritan though he be, he would not blot it out 
of the book because there have been bad bishops ; nay, in 
order to understand him, we must understand that verse 
first; it will not do to eye it askance, or whisper it under 
our breath, as if it were a weapon of an adverse sect. It is 
a solemn, universal assertion, deeply to be kept in mind by 
all sects. But perhaps we shall be better able to reason on 
it if we go on a little farther, and come back to it. For 
clearly, this marked insistance on the power of the true 
episcopate is to make us feel more weightily what is to be 
charged against the false claimants of episcopate ; or gen- 
erally, against false claimants of power and rank in the 
body of the clergy; they who, "for their bellies' sake, 
creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold." 

Do not think Milton uses those three words to fill up his 
verse, as a loose writer would. He needs all the three ; 
specially those three, and no more than those — ''creep," 
and "intrude," and "climb"; no other words would or 
could serve the turn, and no more could be added. For 
they exhaustively comprehend the three classes, corre- 
spondent to the three characters, of men who dishonestly 
seek ecclesiastical power. First, those who '^ creep'' into 
the fold; who do not care for office, nor name, but for 
secret influence, and do all things occultly and cunningly, 

1 Matthew xvi. 19. 



26 JOHN RUSK IN, 

consenting to any servility of office or conduct, so only 
that they may intimately discern, and unawares direct, the 
minds of men. Then those who "intrude" (thrust, that is) 
themselves into the fold, who by natural insolence of heart, 
and stout eloquence of tongue, and fearlessly perseverant 
self-assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the com- 
mon crowd. Lastly, those who "climb," who by labor and 
learning, both stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in the 
cause of their own ambition, gain high dignities and author- 
ities, and become "lords over the heritage," though not 
" ensamples ^ to the flock." 
Now go on: — 

" Of other care they little reckoning make, 

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. 

Blind mouths — " 

I pause again, for this is a strange expression ; a broken 
metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly. 

Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to 
make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those 
two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries 
of right character, in the two great offices of the Church — 
those of bishop and pastor. 

A Bishop means a person who sees.^ 

A Pastor means one who feeds. 

The most unbishoply character a man can have is, there- 
fore, to be Blind. 

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to 
be fed, — to be a Mouth. 

Take the two reverses together, and you have "blind 
mouths." We may advisably follow out this idea a little. 
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops 

1 Ensamples: examples (i Peter v. 3). ^ Bishop: literally, an overseer. 



BOOKS AND READING. 



27 



desiring power more than ligJit. They want authority, not 
outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule ; though 
it may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke ; it is the king's 
office to rule ; the bishop's office is to oversee the flock ; 
to number it, sheep by sheep ; to be ready always to give 
full account of it. Now it is clear he cannot give account 
of the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies 
of his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has 
to do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at 
any moment, he can obtain the history from childhood of 
every living soul in his diocese, and of its present state. 
Down in that back street, Bill and Nancy, knocking each 
other's teeth out ! Does the bishop know all about it } 
Has he his eye upon them t Has he had his eye upon 
them } Can he circumstantially explain to us how Bill 
got into the habit of beating Nancy about the head } If 
he cannot, he is no bishop, though he had a mitre as high 
as Salisbury steeple;^ he is no bishop, — he has sought to 
be at the helm instead of the masthead ; he has no sight 
of things. ''Nay," you say, "it is not his duty to look after 
Bill in the back street." What ! the fat sheep that have 
full fleeces — you think it is only those he should look 
after, while (go back to your Milton) '' the hungry sheep 
look up, and are not fed, besides what the grim wolf, with 
privy paw " (bishops knowing nothing about it) '' daily 
devours apace, and nothing said " } 

"But that's not our idea of a bishop." Perhaps not; 
but it was St. Paul's ; and it was Milton's. They may 
be right, or we may be ; but we must not think we are 
reading either one or the other by putting our meaning 
into their words. 

1 Salisbury steeple : the highest spire in England. 



28 JOHN RUSK IN. 

I go on. 

'' But, swollen with wind, and the rank mist they 
draw." 

This is to meet the vulgar answer that *' if the poor are 
not looked after in their bodies, they are in their souls ; 
they have spiritual food." 

And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual 
food; they are only swollen with wind." At first you may 
think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, 
it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin and 
Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of " Spirit." 
It is only a contraction of the Latin word ''breath," and 
an indistinct translation of the Greek word for "wind." 
The same word is used in writing, "The wind bloweth 
where it listeth^" ; and in writing, "So is every one that 
is born of the Spirit " ;^ born of the breath, that is ; for it 
means the breath of God in soul and body. We have the 
true sense of it in our words "inspiration" and "expire." 
Now, there are two kinds of breath with which the flock 
may be filled ; God's breath, and man's. The breath of 
God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of 
heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath — 
the word which he calls spiritual, — is disease and conta- 
gion to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly 
with it ; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body by the 
vapors of its own decomposition. This is literally true of 
all false religious teaching ; the first and last, and fatalest 
sign of it is that "puffing up." Your converted children, 
who teach their parents ; your converted convicts, who 
teach honest men ; your converted dunces, who, having 

1 Listeth : chooseth. 

2 John iii. 8. 



BOOKS AND READING. 29 

lived in cretinous ^ stupefaction half their lives, suddenly 
awakening to the fact of there being a God, fancy them- 
selves therefore His peculiar people and messengers ; your 
sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or 
Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think 
themselves exclusively in the right and othe>rs wrong ; 
and pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men 
can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, 
by word instead of act, and wish instead of work, — these 
are the true fog children — clouds, these, without water; 
bodies, these, of putrescent vapor and skin, without blood 
or flesh : blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with — • 
corrupt and corrupting, — " Swollen with wind, and the 
rank mist they draw." 

Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power 
of the keys, for now we can understand them. Note the 
difference between Milton and Dante in their interpre- 
tation of this power : for once, the latter is weaker in 
thought ; he supposes botJi the keys to be of the gate of 
heaven ; one is of gold, the other of silver : they are given 
by St. Peter to the sentinel angel ; and it is not easy to 
determine the meaning either of the substances of the 
three steps of the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton 
makes one, of gold, the key of heaven ; the other, of iron, 
the key of the prison, in which the wicked teachers are to 
be bound who "have taken away the key of knowledge, 
yet entered not in themselves." ^ 

We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are 
to see, and feed ; and, of all who do so, it is said, "He 

1 Cretinous : pertaining to a cretin, a name for a deformed and helpless 
idiot, common in the valleys of Switzerland. 

2 Luke xi. 52. 



30 JOHN RUSK IN. 

that watereth, shall be watered also himself." ^ But the 
reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be 
withered himself, and he that seeth not, shall himself be 
shut out of sight, — shut into the perpetual prison-house. 
And that prison opens here, as well as hereafter : he who 
is to be bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. 
That command to the strong angels, of which the rock- 
apostle ^ is the image, ''Take him, and bind him hand and 
foot, and cast him out," ^ issues, in its measure, against 
the teacher, for every help withheld, and for every truth 
refused, and for every falsehood enforced ; so that he is 
more strictly fettered the more he fetters, and farther out- 
cast, as he more and more misleads, till at last the bars 
of the iron cage close upon him, and as *' the golden opes, 
the iron shuts amain." 

We have got something out of the lines, I think, and 
much more is yet to be found in them ; but we have done 
enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word 
examination of your author which is rightly called "read- 
ing " ; watching every accent and expression, and putting 
ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our 
own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be 
able assuredly to say, ''Thus Milton thought," not "Thus 
I thought, in misreading Milton." And by this process 
you will gradually come to attach less weight to your own 
"Thus I thought " at other times. You will begin to per- 
ceive that what yoic thought was a matter of no serious 
importance ; that your thoughts on any subject are not 
perhaps the clearest and wisest that could be arrived at 

1 Proverbs xi. 25. 

2 Rock-apostle: Peter; literally, a rock. See Matthew xvi. 18. 

3 Matthew xxii. 13. 



BOOKS AND READING. 3 I 

thereupon : in fact, that unless you are a very singular 
person, you cannot be said to have any ''thoughts " at all ; 
that you have no material for them, in any serious matters ; 
no right to ''think," but only to try to learn more of the 
facts. Nay, most probably all your life (unless, as I said, 
you are a singular person) you will have no legitimate 
right to an " opinion " on any business, except that in- 
stantly under your hand. What must of necessity be 
done, you can always find out, beyond question, how to 
do. Have you a house to keep in order, a commodity to 
sell, a field to plough, a ditch to cleanse } There need be 
no two opinions about these proceedings ; it is at your 
peril if you have not much more than an "opinion" on 
the way to manage such matters. And also, outside of 
your own business, there are one or two subjects on which 
you are bound to have but one opinion. That roguery 
and lying are objectionable, and are instantly to be flogged 
out of the way whenever discovered ; that covetousness 
and love of quarrelling are dangerous dispositions even in 
children, and deadly dispositions in men and nations; — 
that in the end, the God of heaven and earth loves active, 
modest, and kind people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, 
and cruel ones ; — on these general facts you are bound to 
have but one, and that a very strong, opinion. For the 
rest, respecting religions, governments, sciences, arts, you 
will find that, on the whole, you can know nothing, — judge 
nothing ; that the best you can do, even though you may 
be a well-educated person, is to be silent, and strive to 
be wiser every day, and to understand a little more of the 
thoughts of others, which so soon as you try to do honestly, 
you will discover that the thoughts even of the wisest are 



32 JOHN RUSK IN. 

very little more than pertinent questions.^ To put the 
difficulty into a clear shape, and exhibit to you the grounds 
for ^/^decision, that is all they can generally do for you ! — 
and well for them and for us, if indeed they are able " to 
mix the music with our thoughts, and sadden us with 
heavenly doubts." This writer, from whom I have been 
reading to you, is not among the first or wisest : *' he sees 
shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it is easy to find 
out his full meaning ; but with the greater men, you can- 
not fathom their meaning ; they do not even wholly meas- 
ure it themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose I had asked 
you, for instance, to seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead 
of Milton's, on this matter of Church authority } or for 
Dante's } Have any of you, at this instant, the least idea 
what either thought about it } Have you ever balanced 
the scene with the bishops in Richard HI. against the 
character of Cranmer } the description of St. Francis and 
St. Dominic against that of him who made Virgil wonder 
to gaze upon him,^ — "disteso, tanto vilmente, nell' eterno 
esilio"; or of him^ whom Dante stood beside, "come 
'1 frate che confessa lo perfido assassin } " Shakespeare 
and Alighieri* knew men better than most of us, I pre- 
sume! They were both in the midst of the main struggle 
between the temporal and spiritual powers. They had 
an opinion, we may guess. But where is it } Bring it 
into court ! Put Shakespeare's or Dante's creed into 
articles, and send tJiat up into the Ecclesiastical Courts ! 

1 Pertinent : appropriate, or to the point. 

2 Him : Caiaphas (see John xi. 50) " distended (on the cross) so ignomin- 
iously in the eternal exile." — Dante's Inferno, xxiii. 126. 

2 Him : Nicholas III. (" I stood ") " like the friar who is confessing a 
treacherous assassin." — Infei-no, xix. 49. 

^ Alighieri: Dante Alighieri (Dan'ta A-le-ge-a'ree). 



BOOKS AND READING. 33 

You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and 
many a day, to come at the real purposes and teaching of 
these great men ; but a very little honest study of them 
will enable you to perceive that what* you took for your 
own ''judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and drifted, 
helpless, entangled weed of castaway thought : nay, you 
will see that most men's minds are indeed little better than 
rough heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly 
barren, partly overgrown with pestilent brakes and veno- 
mous wind-sown herbage of evil surmise ; that the first 
thing you have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and 
scornfully to set fire to this ; burn all the jungle into whole- 
some ash heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true 
literary work before you, for life, must begin with obedi- 
ence to that order. " Break up your fallow ground, and 
soiv not anioig t /ion is.'' ^ 

II. Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers, 
that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this 
higher advance to make; — you have to enter into their 
Hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight, so you 
must stay with them that you may share at last their just 
and mighty Passion. Passion, or ''sensation." I am not 
afraid of the word ; still less of the thing. You have heard 
many outcries against sensation lately ; but, I can tell you, 
it is not less sensation we want, but more. The ennoblinof 
difference between one man and another, — between one 
animal and another, — is precisely this, that one feels more 
than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation 
might not be easily got for us ; if we were earth-worms, 
liable at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, per 

1 Jeremiah iv. 3. 



34 JOHN RUSK IN. 

haps too much sensation might not be good for us. But, 
being human creatures, // is good for us ; nay, we are only 
human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honor is pre- 
cisely in proportion to our passion. 

You know I said of that great and pure society of the 
dead, that it would allow " no vain or vulgar person to 
enter there." What do you think I meant by a "vulgar" 
person .!* What do you yourselves mean by "vulgarity"? 
You will find it a fruitful subject of thought ; but, briefly, 
the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Sim- 
ple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and unde- 
veloped bluntness of body and mind ; but in true inbred 
vulgarity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in extrem- 
ity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and 
crime, v/ithout fear, without pleasure, without horror, and 
without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, 
in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men 
become vulgar ; they are for ever vulgar, precisely in pro- 
portion as they are incapable of sympathy, — of quick un- 
derstanding, — of all that, in deep insistence on the com- 
mon, but most accurate term, may be called the " tact " or 
touch-faculty of body and soul ; that tact which the Mimosa 
has in trees, which the pure woman has above all crea- 
tures ; — fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason ; 
— the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can 
but determine what is true : — it is the God-given passion 
of humanity which alone can recognize what God has 
made good. 

We come then to the great concourse of the Dead, not 
merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel 
with them what is Righteous. Now, to feel with them, we 
must be like them ; and none of us can become that with- 



BOOKS AND READING. 35 

out pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested 
knowledge, — not the first thought that comes, — so the 
true passion is disciplined and tested passion — not the 
first passion that comes. The first that come are the vain, 
the false, the treacherous ; if you yield to them they will 
lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, 
till you have no true purpose and no true passion left. Not 
that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but 
only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobility is in its force 
and justice ; it is wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry 
cause. There is a mean wonder as of a child who sees a 
juggler tossing golden balls, and this is base, if you will. 
But do you think that the wonder is ignoble, or the sensa- 
tion less, with which every human soul is called to watch 
the golden balls of heaven tossed through the night by the 
Hand that made them t There is a mean curiosity, as of 
a child opening a forbidden door, or a servant prying into 
her master's business; — and a noble- curiosity, question- 
ing, in the front of danger, the source of the great river 
beyond the sand — the place of the great continents be- 
yond the sea ; — a nobler curiosity still, which questions of 
the source of the River of Life, and of the space of the 
Continent of Heaven, — things which ''the angels desire 
to look into." So the anxiety is ignoble, with which you 
linger over the course and catastrophe of an idle tale ; but 
do you think the anxiety is less, or greater, with which you 
watch, or oiigJit to watch, the dealings of fate and destiny 
with the life of an agonized nation t Alas ! it is the narrow- 
ness, selfishness, minuteness, of your sensation that you 
have to deplore in England at this day ; — sensation which 
spends itself in bouquets and speeches ; in revellings and 
junketings ; in sham fights and gay puppet shows, while 



36 JOHN RUSK IN. 

you can look on and see noble nations murdered, man 
by man, woman by woman, child by child, without an 
effort, or a tear. 

I said ''minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, 
but in a word, I ought to have said "injustice" or 
"unrighteousness" of sensation. For as in nothing is 
a gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar per- 
son, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have 
been) better to be discerned from a mob, than in this, 
— that their feelings are constant and just, results of 
due contemplation, and of equal thought. You can talk 
a mob into anything ; its feelings may be — usually are — 
on the whole generous and right ; but it has no foundation 
for them, no hold of them ; you may tease or tickle it into 
any, at your pleasure ; it thinks by infection, for the most 
part, catching a passion like a cold, and there is nothing 
so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when the fit 
is on : — nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, 
when the fit is past. But a gentleman's or a gentle na- 
tion's, passions are just, measured, and continuous. A 
great nation, for instance, does not spend its entire wits 
for a couple of months in weighing evidence of a single 
rufBan's having done a single murder ; and for a couple of 
years, see its own children murder each other by their 
thousands or tens of thousands a day, considering only 
what the effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and 
caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in the 
wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little 
boys to jail for stealing six walnuts, and allow its bank- 
rupts to steal their hundreds or thousands with a bow, and 
its bankers, rich with poor men's savings, to close their 
doors "under circumstances over which they have no con- 



BOOKS AND READING. 37 

trol," with a "by your leave" ; and large landed estates to 
be bought by men who have made their money by going 
with armed steamers up and down the China Seas, selling 
opium at the cannon's mouth, and altering, for the benefit 
of the foreign nation, the common highwayman's demand 
of "your money 6^ your life," into that of "your hioney 
and your life." 

My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk 
about reading. We want some sharper discipline than 
that of reading ; but, at all events, be assured, we cannot 
read. No reading is possible for a people with its mind in 
this state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible 
to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the Eng- 
lish public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful 
writing, — so incapable of thought has it become in its 
insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little 
worse than this incapacity of thought ; it is not corruption 
of the inner nature ; we ring true still, when anything 
strikes home to us ; and though the idea that everything 
should "pay" has infected our every purpose so deeply, 
that even when we would play the good Samaritan, we 
never take out our twopence and give them to the host, 
without saying, " When I come again, thou shalt give me 
fourpence," there is a capacity of noble passion left in our 
hearts' core. We show it in our work — in our war, — 
even in those unjust domestic affections which make us 
furious at a small private wrong, while we are polite to a 
boundless public one : we are still industrious to the last 
hour of the day, though we add the gambler's fury to the 
laborer's patience ; we are still brave to the death, though 
incapable of discerning true cause for battle, and are still 
true in affection to our own flesh, to the death, as the sea- 



38 JOHN RUSKIN. 

monsters are, and the rock-eagles. And there is hope for 
a nation while this can be still said of it. As long as it 
holds its life in its hand, ready to give it for its honor 
(though a foolish honor), for its love (though a selfish love), 
and for its business (though a base business), there is hope 
for it. But hope only ; for this instinctive, reckless virtue 
cannot last. No nation can last, which has made a mob of 
itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline its 
passions, and direct them, or they will discipline it, one 
day, with scorpion whips.^ Above all, a nation cannot last 
as a money-making mob : it cannot with impunity, — it 
cannot with existence, — go on despising literature, despis- 
ing science, despising art, despising nature, despising com- 
passion, and concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you 
think these are harsh or wild words ? Have patience with 
me but a little longer. I will prove their truth to you, 
clause by clause. 

I. I say first we have despised literature. What do we, 
as a nation, care about books } How much do you think 
we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as 
compared with what we spend on our horses t If a man 
spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad — a biblio- 
maniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, 
though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, 
and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their 
books. Or, to go lower still, how much do you think the 
contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, pub- 
lic and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents 
of its wine-cellars t What position would its expenditure 
on literature take, as compared with its expenditure on 

1 Scorpion whips : whips shaped like the tail of a scorpion, and armed 
with iron points — any terrible punishment. 



BOOKS AND READING. 39 

luxurious eating? We talk of food for the mind, as of 
food for the body : now a good book contains such food 
inexhaustibly ; it is a provision for life, and for the best 
part of us ; yet how long most people would look at the 
best book before they would give the price of a large 
turbot for it ! Though there have been men who have 
pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a 
book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in 
the end, than most men's dinners are. We are few of us 
put to such trial, and more the pity ; for, indeed, a precious 
thing is all the more precious to us if it has been won by 
work or economy ; and if public libraries were half as 
costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of 
what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might 
sometimes suspect there was good in reading, as well as 
in munching and sparkling ; whereas the very cheapness 
of literature is making even wise people forget that if a 
book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is 
worth anything which is not worth nmcJi ; nor is it ser- 
viceable, until it has been read, and reread, and loved, and 
loved again ; and marked, so that you can refer to the pas- 
sages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he 
needs in an armory, or a housewife bring the spice she 
needs from her store. Bread of flour is good : but there 
is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good 
book ; and the family must be poor indeed which, once in 
their lives cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay 
their baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and we 
are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other's books 
out of circulating libraries ! 

II. I say we have despised science. "What!" (you 
exclaim) " are we not foremost in all discovery, and is not 



40 JOHN RUSK IN. 

the whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of our in- 
ventions ? " Yes ; but do you suppose that is national 
work ? That work is all done in spite of the nation ; by 
private people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, 
indeed, to make our profit of science ; we snap up any- 
thing in the way of a scientific bone that has meat on it, 
eagerly enough ; but if the scientific man comes for a bone 
or a crust to us, that is another story. What have we pub- 
licly done for science } We are obliged to know what 
o'clock it is, for the safety of our ships, and therefore we 
pay for an observatory ^ ; and we allow ourselves, in the 
person of our Parliament, to be annually tormented into 
doing something, in a slovenly way, for the British Mu- 
seum ; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for keep- 
ing stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. If anybody 
will pay for his own telescope, and resolve another nebiila,^ 
we cackle over the discernment as if it were our own ; if 
one in ten thousand of our hunting squires ^ suddenly per- 
ceives that the earth was indeed made to be something 
else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it himself, 
and tells us where the gold is, and where the coals, we 
understand that there is some use in that ; and very prop- 
erly knight * him ; but is the accident of his having found 
out how to employ himself usefully any credit to 7isf (The 
negation of such discovery among his brother squires may 

1 Observatory : one chief use of an observatory, such as the English 
national observatory at Greenwich, is to furnish absolutely correct or astro- 
nomical time, in order that the masters of ships may be able to calculate their 
position and course at sea. 

2 Resolve another nebula : powerful telescopes show that the nebulae or 
cloud-like patches of hght seen at night in certain parts of the heaven — e.g. 
the Milky Way — can be resolved into thousands of distinct stars. 

•^ Squires : country gentlemen. 

* Knight : to give the title of baronet or sir, as Sir James Clark. 



BOOKS AND READING. 4 1 

perhaps be some ^//>credit to us, if we would consider of it.) 
But if you doubt these generalities, here is one fact for us 
all to meditate upon, illustrative of our love of science. 
Two years ago there was a collection of the fossils of Solen- 
hofen to be sold in Bavaria : the best in existence, con- 
taining many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, 
unique as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of 
unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil). 
This collection, of which the mere market worth, among 
private buyers, would probably have been some thousand 
or twelve hundred pounds,^ was offered to the English 
nation for seven hundred : but we would not give seven 
hundred, and the whole series would have been in the 
Munich 2 Museum at this moment, if Professor Owen * had 
not, with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting 
of the British public in person of its representatives, got 
leave to give four hundred pounds at once, and himself be- 
come answerable for the other three ! which the said pub- 
lic will doubtless pay him eventually, but sulkily, and car- 
ing nothing about the matter all the while ; only always 
ready to cackle if any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg 
of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. Your annual 
expenditure for public purposes (a third of it for military 
apparatus) is at least fifty millions. Now 700/. is to 
50,000,000/. roughly, as seven pence to two thousand 
pounds. Suppose, then, a gentleman of unknown in- 
come, but whose wealth was to be conjectured from the 

1 Pound : $5.00. 

2 Munich (Mu'nik). 

* I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission; which of course he 
could not with propriety have granted, had I asked it; but I consider it so 
important that the public should be aware of the fact, that I do what seems to 
me right, though rude. 



42 JOHN RUSKm. 

fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park-walls 
and footmen only, professes himself fond of science ; and 
that one of his servants comes eagerly to tell him that an 
unique collection of fossils, giving clue to a new era of 
creation, is to be had for the sum of seven pence sterling ; 
and that the gentleman, who is fond of science, and spends 
two thousand a year on his park, answ^ers, after keeping 
his servant waiting several months, "Well! I'll give you 
four pence for them, if you will be answerable for the 
extra three pence yourself, till next year ! " 

III, I say you have despised Art ! " What ! " you again 
answer, '' have we not Art exhibitions, miles long ? and 
do we not pay thousands of pounds for single pictures ? 
and have we not Art schools and institutions, more than 
ever nation had before ? " Yes, truly, but all that is for 
the sake of the shop. You would fain sell canvas as well 
as coals, and crockery as well as iron ; you would take 
every other nation's bread out of its mouth if you could ; * 
not being able to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in 
the thoroughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices 
screaming to every passer-by, " What d'ye lack ? " ^ You 
know nothing of your own faculties or circumstances ; you 
fancy that, among your damp, flat fields of clay, you can 
have as quick art -fancy as the Frenchman among his 
bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic cliffs ; — 
that Art may be learned as book-keeping is, and when 
learned will give you more books to keep. You care for 

♦That was our real idea of " Free Trade" — "All the trade to myself." 
You find now that by " competition " other people can manage to sell some- 
thing as well as you — and now we call for Protection again. Wretches! 

1 " What d'ye lack ? " This was once the common street cry of the Lon- 
don (Ludgate Hill District) apprentices when soliciting customers for their 
masters' wares. See Scott's " Fortunes of Nigel." 



BOOKS AND READING. 43 

pictures, absolutely, no more than you do for the bills 
pasted on your dead walls. There is always room on the 
walls for the bills to be read, — never for the pictures to 
be seen. You do not know what pictures you have (by 
repute) in the country, nor whether they are false or true, 
nor whether they are taken care of or not ; in foreign coun- 
tries, you calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the 
world rotting in abandoned wreck — (and, in Venice, with 
the Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the palaces con- 
taining them), and if you heard that all the Titians^ in 
Europe were made sand-bags to-morrow on the Austrian 
forts, it would not trouble you so much as the chance of 
a brace or two of game less in your own bags in a day's 
shooting. That is your national love of Art. 

IV. You have despised nature ; that is to say, all the 
deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French 
revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France ; 
you have made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth. 
Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad car- 
riages round their aisles, and eat off their altars.* You 
have put a railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen. 
You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel ; 
you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Ge- 
neva ; there is not a quiet valley in England that you have 
not filled with bellowing fire : there is no particle left of 
English land which you have not trampled coal ashes into 
— nor any foreign city in which the spread of your pres- 

1 Titians : paintings by Titian, a celebrated Italian artist of the sixteenth 
century. Sand-bags are used in fortification. 

* I meant that the beautiful places in the world — Switzerland, Italy, South 
Germany, and so on — are, indeed, the truest cathedrals — places to be rev- 
erent in, and to worship in ; and that we only care to drive through them: 
and to eat and drink at their most sacred places. 



44 JOHN RUSK IN. 

ence is not marked among its fair old streets and happy- 
gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels and 
perfumers' shops : the Alps themselves, which your own 
poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped 
poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb, 
and slide down again, with "shrieks of delight." When 
you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice 
to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their val- 
leys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cu- 
taneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive 
hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sor- 
rowfulest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking 
the deep inner significance of them, are the English mobs 
in the valley of Chamouni,^ amusing themselves with firing 
rusty howitzers 2; and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich^ ex- 
pressing their Christian thanks for the gift of the vine, by 
assembling in knots in the ''towers of the vineyards," and 
slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morning till 
evening. It is pitiful to have dim conceptions of beauty ; 
more pitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, 
of mirth. 

Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — ''magnanimous"* 

— to be this, is indeed to be great in life ; to become this 
increasingly, is, indeed, to "advance in life," — in life itself 

— not in the trappings ^ of it. My friends, do you remem- 
ber that old Scythian ^ custom, when the head of a house 

1 Chamouni (Shamoonee'). 

2 Howitzers : light cannon used for firing shells or bombs. 
« Zurich (Zoo'rik). 

* Magnanimous : from w^?o-;/«^, great, and animus^ mind; hence, great 
or mighty of mind. 

^ Trappings : adornments. 

^ Scythian : pertaining to Scythia, a name given in ancient times to the 
country north and east of the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the Sea of Aral. 



BOOKS AND READING. 45 

died ? How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in 
his chariot, and carried about to his friends' houses ; and 
eacli of them placed him at his table's head, and all feasted 
in his presence ? Suppose it were offered to you, in plain 
words, as it is offered to you in dire facts, that you should 
gain this Scythian honor, gradually, while you yet thought 
yourself alive. Suppose the offer w^ere this : *' You shall 
die slowly ; your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh 
petrify, your heart beat at last only as a rusted group of 
iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, and sink 
through the earth into the ice of Caina^; but, day by 
day, your body shall be dressed more gaily, and set in 
higher chariots, and have more orders ^ on its breast — 
crowns on its head, if you will. Men shall bow before it, 
stare and shout round it, crowd after it up and down the 
streets ; build palaces for it, feast with it at their tables* 
heads all the night long ; your soul shall stay enough 
within it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the 
golden dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown- 
edge on the skull ; — no more." Would you take the offer, 
verbally made by the death-angel } Would the meanest 
among us take it, think you ? Yet practically and verily 
we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure ; many of us 
grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, 
who desires to advance in life without knowing what life 
is ; who means only that he is to get more horses, and 
more footmen,^ and more fortune, and more public honor, 
and — not more personal soul. He only is advancing in 
life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, 

1 Caina : an ice-ribbed region of Dante's hell. 

- Orders : liere, military or other badges of honor. 

3 Footmen : men-servants in livery. 



46 JOHN RUSK IN. 

whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living * 
peace. And the men who have this life in them are the 
true lords or kings of the earth — they, and .they only. All 
other kingships, so far as they are true, are only the prac- 
tical issue and expression of theirs ; if less than this, they 
are either dramatic royalties, — costly shows, with real 
jewels instead of tinsel — the toys of nations; or else, 
they are no royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere 
active and practical issue of national folly ; for which 
reason I have said of them elsewhere, ''Visible govern- 
ments are the toys of some nations, the diseases of others, 
the harness^ of some, the burdens of more." 

But I have no words for the wonder with which I hear 
Kinghood still spoken of, even among thoughtful men, as 
if governed nations were a personal property, and might 
be bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, as sheep, of 
whose flesh their king was to feed, and whose fleece he 
was to gather ; as if Achilles' indignant epithet of base 
kings, "people-eating," were the constant and proper title 
of all monarchs; and enlargement of a king's dominion 
meant the same thing as the increase of a private man's 
estate ! Kings who think so, however powerful, can no 
more be the true kings of the nation than gad-flies are the 
kings of a horse ; they suck it, and may drive it wild, but 
do not guide it. They, and their courts, and their armies 
are, if one could see clearly, only a large species of marsh 
mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melodious, band- 
mastered, trumpeting in the summer air ; the twilight 
being, perhaps, sometimes fairer, but hardly more whole- 

* " TO 5e (ppovrtij.a rov irviv^aTos C'^t) /cat €ipr)vr{." ^ 
1 Harness : here, armor or defence. 
2 " To be spiritually minded is life and peace." — liomafis vi. 8. 



BOOKS AND READING. 47 

some, for its glittering mists of midge companies. The 
true kings, meanwhile, rule quietly, if at all, and hate 
ruling; too many of them make " il gran refiuto";^ and 
if they do not, the mob, as soon as they are likely to 
become useful to it, is pretty sure to make its "gran 
refiuto " of tJicvi. 

Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, 
if ever day comes when he will estimate his dominion by 
the force of it, — not the geographical boundaries. It 
matters very little whether Trent cuts you a cantel ^ out 
here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it does 
matter to you, king of men, whether you can verily say 
to this man, ** Go," and he goeth ; and to another, " Come," 
and he cometh. Whether you can turn your people as 
you can Trent — and where it is that you bid them come, 
and where go. It matters to you, king of men, whether 
your people hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live 
by you. You may measure your dominion by multitudes 
better than by miles ; and count degrees of love latitude, 
not from, but to, a wonderfully warm and infinite equator. 
Measure ! nay you cannot measure. Who shall measure 
the difference between the power of those who "do and 
teach," and who are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, as 
of heaven — and the power of those who undo, and con- 
sume — whose power, at the fullest, is only the power of 
the moth and the rust } Strange ! to think how the Moth- 
kings lay up treasures for the moth, and the Rust-kings, 
who are to their peoples' strength as rust to armor, lay up 
treasures for the rust ; and the Robber-kings, treasures for 
the robber ; but how few kings have ever laid up treasures 

1 II gran refiuto : a grand renunciation. 
^ Cantel : a corner or piece. 



48 JOHN RUSK IN. 

that needed no guarding — treasures of which, the more 
thieves there were, the better ! Broidered robe, only to 
be rent — helm ^ and sword, only to be dimmed ; jewel and 
gold, only to be scattered — there have been three kinds 
of kings who have gathered these. Suppose there ever 
should arise a fourth order of kings, who had read, in some 
obscure writing of long ago, that there was a fourth kind 
of treasure, which the jewel and gold could not equal, 
neither should it be valued with pure gold. A web more 
fair in the weaving, by Athena's ^ shuttle; an armor, 
forged in diviner fire by Vulcanian^ force — a gold only 
to be mined in the sun's red heart, where he sets over 
the Delphian^ cliffs ; — deep-pictured tissue,^ impenetrable 
armor, potable ^ gold ! — the three great Angels of Con- 
duct, Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and waiting at 
the posts of our doors, to lead us, if we would, with their 
winged power, and guide us, with their inescapable eyes, 
by the path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vul- 
ture's eye has not seen.'' Suppose kings should ever 
arise, who heard and believed this word, and at last gath- 
♦ ered and brought forth treasures of — Wisdom — for their 
people .'* 

Think what an amazing business that would be ! How 
inconceivable, in the state of our present national wisdom ! 

1 Helm : here, helmet. 

2 Athena: the Greek goddess of wisdom and of the arts; she is usually 
called Minerva, 

^ Vulcanian : referring to Vulcan, the Greek god who presided over fite 
and the working of metals; the word is also used of volcanic force. 

* Delphian : relating to Delphi, in Greece. 

^ Deep-pictured tissue : a fabric interwoven with gold and colors, often 
so as to form figures or pictures. 

6 Potable : drinkable. 

■^ Job xxviii. 7. 



BOOKS AND READING. 



49 



That we should bring up our peasants to a book exercise 
instead of a bayonet exercise! — organize, drill, maintain 
with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, in- 
stead of armies of stabbers ! — find national amusement 
in reading-rooms as well as rifle-grounds ; give prizes for 
a fair shot at a fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a tar- 
get. What an absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, 
that the wealth of the capitalists of civilized nations 
should ever come to support literature instead of war! 
Have yet patience with me, while I read you a single 
sentence out of the only book, properly to be called a 
book, that I have yet written myself, the one that will 
stand, (if anything stand,) surest and longest of all work 
of mine. 

'' It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth 
in Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which sup- 
ports unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much money 
to support them ; for most of the men who wage such, 
wage them gratis; but for an unjust war, men's bodies 
and souls have both to be bought ; and the best tools of 
war for them besides, which makes such war costly to the 
maximum ^ ; not to speak of the cost of base fear, and 
angry suspicion, between nations which have not grace 
nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to buy an 
hour's peace of mind with ; as, at present France and 
England, purchasing of each other ten millions' sterling 
worth of consternation, annually (a remarkably light crop, 
half thorns and half aspen leaves, sown, reaped, and 
granaried by the * science ' of the modern political econo- 
mist, teaching covetousness instead of truth). And, all 
unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of the 

^ Maximum : greatest degree. 



50 JOHN RUSK IN. 

enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are 
repaid by subsequent taxation ^ of the people, who appear 
to have no will in the matter, the capitalists' will being the 
primary root of the war ; but its real root is the covetous- 
ness of the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, 
frankness, or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in 
due time, his own separate loss and punishment to each 
person, " 

France and England literally, observe, buy panic of 
each other ; they pay, each of them, for ten thousand 
thousand pounds' worth of terror, a year. Now suppose, 
instead of buying these ten millions' worth of panic 
annually, they made up their minds to be at peace with 
each other, and buy ten millions' worth of knowledge 
annually ; and that each nation spent its ten thousand 
thousand pounds a year in founding royal libraries, royal 
museums, royal gardens, and places of rest. Might it not 
be better somewhat for both French and English } 

It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. Never- 
theless, I hope it will not be long before royal or national 
libraries will be founded in every considerable city, with a 
royal series of books in them ; the same series in every 
one of them, chosen books, the best in every kind, pre- 
pared for that national series in the most perfect way pos- 
sible ; their text printed all on leaves of equal size, broad 
of margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the 

1 Taxation : about seventy-five cents out of every dollar of taxes levied 
in England is spent either in paying the interest of old war debts or in mak- 
ing preparation for future wars. The enormous expense of the great standing 
armies of Europe, says Professor Atkinson, is draining the very life-blood of 
the people. Eventually, as he says, the countries of the old world must ^^ dis- 
arm or starve?'' 

2 Raskin's "Unto this Last" (Ad Valorem). 



BOOKS AND READING. 5 I 

hand, beautiful, and strong, and thorough as examples of 
binders' work ; and that these great libraries will be acces- 
sible to all clean and orderly persons at all times of the 
day and evening ; strict law being enforced for this clean- 
liness and quietness. 

I could shape for you other plans, for art-galleries, and 
for natural history galleries, and for many precious, many, 
it seems to me, needful, things ; but this book plan is the 
easiest and needfulest, and would prove a considerable 
tonic to what we call our British constitution, which has 
fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil thirst, and evil 
hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its 
corn laws ^ repealed for it ; try if you cannot get corn 
laws established for it, dealing in a better bread; — bread 
made of that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame,^ 
which opens doors ; — doors, not of robbers', but of Kings' 
Treasuries. 

Friends, the treasuries of true kings are the streets of 
their cities ; and the gold they gather, which for others is 
as the mire of the streets, changes itself, for them and their 
people, into a crystalline pavement for evermore. 

1 Corn laws : laws which imposed a heavy duty on all grain (" corn ") im- 
ported into England, thus keeping up the price of bread, and causing great 
distress among the laboring classes. These laws were modified between 1846 
-1849, and finally repealed in 1869. 

- Sesame : a kind of grain used for food in Eastern countries. In the 
story of the Forty Thieves in the Arabian Nights, " Sesame " is the magic word 
which would open or shut the door of the robbers' cave. 



BOOKS AND READING/ 

SECOND LECTURE. 

IT will, perhaps, be well, as this lecture is the sequel of 
one previously given, that I should shortly state to you 
my general intention in both. The questions specially 
proposed to you in the first, namely, How and What to 
Read, rose out of a far deeper one, which it was my 
endeavor to make you propose earnestly to yourselves, 
namely, IV/ij^ to Read. I want you to feel, with me, that 
whatever advantages we possess in the present day in the 
diffusion of education and of literature, can only be rightly 
used by any of us when we have apprehended clearly what 
education is to lead to, and literature to teach. I wish you 
to see that both well-directed moral training and well- 
chosen reading lead to the possession of a power over the 
ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to the measure 
of it, in the truest sense, kingly ; conferring indeed the 
purest kingship that can exist among men : too many other 
kingships (however distinguished by visible insignia ^ or 
material power) being either spectral, or tyrannous; — 
Spectral — that is to say, aspects and shadows only of roy- 
alty, hollow as death, and which only the " Likeness of a 
kingly crown have on " ; or else tyrannous — that is to say, 
substituting their own will for the law of justice and love 
by which all true kings rule. 

1 From " Sesame and Lilies " (Lilies — Queens' Gardens). 

2 Insignia : badges or distinguishing marks of honor and rank. 



BOOK'S AXD READING, 



53 



There is, then, I repeat — and as I want to leave this 
idea with you, I begin with it, and shall end with it — only 
one pure kind of kingship ; an inevitable and eternal kind, 
crowned or not : the kingship, namely, which consists in a 
stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than 
that of others; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to 
raise them. Observe that word ''State"; we have got 
into a loose way of using it. It means literally the stand- 
ing and stability of a thing ; and you have the full force of 
it in the derived word ''statue " — "the immovable thing." 
A king's majesty or "state," then, and the right of his 
kingdom to be called a state, depends on the movelessness 
of both : — without tremor, without quiver of balance; 
established and enthroned upon a foundation of eternal 
law which nothing can alter nor overthrow. 

Believing that all literature and all education are only 
useful so far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, 
and therefore kingly, power— first, over ourselves, and, 
through ourselves, over all around us, I am now going to 
ask you to consider with me farther, what special portion 
or kind of this royal authority, arising out of noble edu- 
cation, may rightly be possessed by women ; and how far 
they also are called to a true queenly power. Not in their 
households merely, but over all within their sphere. And 
in what sense, if they rightly understood and exercised 
this royal or gracious influence, the order and beauty in- 
duced by such benignant power would justify us in speak- 
ing of the territories over which each of them reigned, as 
"Queens' Gardens." 

And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far deeper 
question, which — strange though this may seem — re- 
mains among many of us yet quite undecided, in spite of 
its infinite importance. 



54 JOHN RUSK IN. 

We cannot determine what the queenly power of women 
should be, until we are agreed what their ordinary power 
should be. We cannot consider how education may fit 
them for any widely extending duty, until we are agreed 
what is their true constant duty. And there never was a 
time when wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagi- 
nation permitted, respecting this question — quite vital to 
all social happiness. The relations of the womanly to the 
manly nature, their different capacities of intellect or of 
virtue, seem never to have been yet measured with entire 
consent. We hear of the mission and of the rights of 
Woman, as if these could ever be separate from the mis- 
sion and the rights of Man ; — as if she and her lord 
were creatures of independent kind and of irreconcilable 
claim. This, at least, is wrong. And not less wrong — 
perhaps even more foolishly wrong (for I will anticipate 
thus far what I hope to prove) — is the idea that woman is 
only the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing 
him a thoughtless and servile obedience, and supported 
altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of his 
fortitude. 

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting her 
who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could 
be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave ! 

Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear 
and harmonious idea (it must be harmonious if it is true) 
of what womanly mind and virtue are in power and office, 
with respect to man's; and how their relations, rightly 
accepted, aid, and increase, the vigor, and honor, and au- 
thority of both. 

And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last 
lecture : namely, that the first use of education was to 



BOOKS AND READING. 55 

enable us to consult with the wisest and the greatest men 
on all points of earnest difficulty. That to use books 
rightly, was to go to them for help : to appeal to them, 
when our own knowledge and power of thought failed ; to 
be led by them into wider sight, purer conception than our 
own, and receive from them the united sentence of the 
judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and 
unstable opinion. 

Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest, 
the wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any 
wise on this point : let us hear the testimony they have 
left respecting what they held to be the true dignity of 
woman, and her mode of help to man. 

And first let us take Shakespeare. 

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes ; 
— he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic 
figure in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry 
the Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of the stage ; and 
the still slighter Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona. In his labored and perfect plays you have no 
hero. Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had 
not been so great as to leave him the prey of every base 
practice round him ; but he is the only example even ap- 
proximating to the heroic type. Coriolanus — Caesar — 
Anthony, stand in flawed strength, and fall by their van- 
ities ; — Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative ; 
Romeo an impatient boy ; the Merchant of Venice lan- 
guidly submissive to adverse fortune ; Kent, in King Lear, 
is entirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to 
be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into the 
office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet the 
despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved, by 



56 JOHN RUSK IN. 

Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a 
perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless 
purpose ; Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imo- 
gen, Queen Katherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, 
Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virginia, are all 
faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of hu- 
manity. 

Then observe secondly. 

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the 
folly or fault of a man ; the redemption, if there be any, is 
by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and failing that, 
there is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to 
his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his mis- 
understanding of his children ; the virtue of his one true 
daughter would have saved him from all the injuries of the 
others, unless he had cast her away from him ; as it is, she 
all but saves him. 

Of Othello I need not trace the tale ; nor the one weak- 
ness of his so mighty love ; nor the inferiority of his 
perceptive intellect to that even of the second woman 
character in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testi- 
mony against his error : — " Oh, murderous coxcomb ^ ! 
What should such a fool Do with so good a wife } " 

In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and entirely brave strata- 
gem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless 
impatience of her husband. In Winter's Tale, and in 
Cymbeline, the happiness and existence of two princely 
households, lost through long years, and imperilled to the 
death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are 
redeemed at last by the queenly patience and wisdom of 
the wives. In Measure for Measure, the injustice of the 

1 Coxcomb : here, fool (Othello, V. 2) ; and compare King Lear, I. 4. 



BOOKS AND READING. 57 

judges, and the corrupt cowardice of the brother, are 
opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine purity of 
a woman. In Coriolanus, the mother's counsel, acted 
upon in time, would have saved her son from all evil ; his 
momentary forgetfulness of it is his ruin ; her prayer at 
last granted, saves him — not, indeed, from death, but 
from the curse of living as the destroyer of his country. 

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the 
fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked child ? — of 
Helena, against the petulance and insult of a careless 
youth ? — of the patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice, 
and the calmly devoted wisdom of the " unlessoned girl," 
who appears among the helplessness, the blindness, and 
the vindictive passions of men, as a gentle angel, to save 
merely by her presence, and defeat the worst intensities 
of crime by her smile? 

Observe, further, among all the principal figures in 
Shakespeare's plays, there is only one weak woman — 
Ophelia; and it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical 
moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide 
to him when he needs her most, that all the bitter catas- 
trophe follows. Finally, though there are three wicked 
women among the principal figures. Lady Macbeth, Regan, 
and Goneril, they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions 
to the ordinary laws of life ; fatal in their influence also 
in proportion to the power for good which they have 
abandoned. 

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testimony to the 
position and character of women in human life. He 
represents them as infallibly faithful and wise counsel- 
lors, — incorruptibly just and pure examples — strong al- 
ways to sanctify, even when they cannot save. 



58 JOHN RUSK IN. 

Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the 
nature of man, — still less in his understanding of the 
causes and courses of fate, — but only as the writer who 
has given us the broadest view of the conditions and modes 
of ordinary thought in modern society, I ask you next to 
receive the witness of Walter Scott. 

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no 
value : and though the early romantic poetry is very beau- 
tiful, its testimony is of no weight, other than that of a 
boy's ideal. But his true works, studied from Scottish 
life, bear a true witness, and in the whole range of these 
there are but three men who reach the heroic type* — 
Dandie Dinmont, Rob Roy, and Claverhouse : of these, 
one is a border farmer ; another a freebooter ; the third 
a soldier in a bad cause. And these touch the ideal of 
heroism only in their courage and faith, together with a 
strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenly applied, intellectual 
power ; while his younger men are the gentlemanly play- 
things of fantastic fortune, and only by aid (or accident) 
of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the trials they 
involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, or consistent 
character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or deal- 
ing with forms of hostile evil, definitely challenged, and 
resolutely subdued, there is no trace in his conceptions 
of men. Whereas in his imaginations of women, — in the 
characters of Ellen Douglas, of Flora Mclvor, Rose Brad- 

* I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, to have noted 
the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of other great characters of men 
in the Waverley novels — the selfishness and narrowness of thought in Red- 
gauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm in Edward Glendenning, and the like ; 
and I ought to have noticed that there are several quite perfect characters 
sketched sometimes in the backgrounds; three — let us accept joyously this 
courtesy to England and her soldiers — are English officers : Colonel Gardiner, 
Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering. 



BOOKS AND READING. 59 

wardine, Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Red- 
gauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans, 
— with endless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intel- 
lectual power we find in all a quite infallible and inevi- 
table sense of dignity and justice ; a fearless, instant, and 
untiring self-sacrifice to even the appearance of duty, much 
more to its real claims ; and, finally, a patient wisdom of 
deeply restrained affection, which does infinitely more than 
protect its objects from a momentary error ; it gradually 
forms, animates, and exalts the characters of the unworthy 
lovers, until, at the close of the tale, we are just able, and 
no more, to take patience in hearing of their unmerited 
success. 

So that in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it 
is the woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the 
youth ; it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches 
over or educates his mistress. 

Next, take, though more briefly, graver and deeper 
testimony — that of the great Italians and Greeks. You 
know well the plan of Dante's great poem — that it is a 
love-poem to his dead lady, a song of praise for her watch 
over his soul. Stooping only to pity, never to love, she 
yet saves him from destruction — saves him from hell. 
He is going eternally astray in despair ; she comes down 
from heaven to his help, and throughout the ascents of 
Paradise is his teacher, interpreting for him the most diffi- 
cult truths, divine and human, and leading him, with 
rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star. 

I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; if I began I 
could not cease : besides, you might think this a wild 
imagination of one poet's heart. So I will rather read 
to you a few verses of the deliberate writing of a knight 



6o JOHN RUSK IN. 

of Pisa^ to his living lady, wholly characteristic of the 
feeling of all the noblest men of the thirteenth century, 
preserved among many other such records of knightly 
honor and love, which Dante Rossetti has gathered for us 
from among the early Italian poets. 

For lo ! thy law is passed 
That this my love should manifestly be 

To serve and honor thee : 
And so I do ; and my delight is full, 
Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 

Without almost, I am all rapturous, 

Since thus my will was set 
To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence: 
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 

A pain or regret, 
But on thee dwells mine every thought and sense : 
Considering that from thee all virtues spread 

As from a fountain head, — 
That in thy gift is wisdoui's best avail, 

And honor without fail ; 
With whom each sovereign good dwells separate. 
Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. 

Lady, since I conceived 
Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart, 

Afy life has been apart 
In shining brightness and the place of truth ; 

Which till that time, good sooth, 
Groped among shadows in a darkened place. 

Where many hours and days 
It hardly ever had remembered good. 

But now my servitude 
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 

A man from a wild beast 
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived. 

1 Pisa (Pee'sah). 



BOOKS AND READING. 6 1 

You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have had 
a lower estimate of women than this Christian lover. His 
own spiritual subjection to them was indeed not so abso- 
lute ; but as regards their own personal character, it was 
only because you could not have followed me so easily, 
that I did not take the Greek women instead of Shake- 
speare's ; and instance, for chief ideal types of human 
beauty and faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of 
Andromache^; the divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cas- 
sandra ; the playful kindness and simple princess-life of 
happy Nausicaa^; the housewifely calm of that of Penel- 
ope,^ with its watch upon the sea ; the ever patient, fear- 
less, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister, and daughter, 
in Antigone ^ ; the bowing down of Iphigenia,^ lamb-like 
and silent ; and, finally, the expectation of the resurrection, 
made clear to the soul of the Greeks in the return from 
her grave of that Alcestis, who, to save her husband, had 
passed calmly through the bitterness of death. ^ 

Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind 
upon you if I had time. I would take Chaucer, and show 
you why he wrote a Legend of Good Women, but no 
Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, and show 
you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and 
sometimes vanquished; but the soul of Una^ is never 
darkened, and the spear of Britomart^ is never broken. 
Nay, I could go back into the mythical^ teaching of the 
most ancient times, and show you how the great people, 

1 Andromache (An-drom'a-ke). * Antigone (An-tig^o-ne). 

2 Nausicaa (Nau-sic'a-ah). ^ Iphigenia (If-i-ge-ni'ah). 

3 Penelope (Pe-nel'o-pe). 

6 Una : a beautiful woman, the impersonation of Truth, in Spenser's poem 
of the " Faery Queene." 

' Britomart : the impersonation of Purity in Spenser's " Faery Queene." 
^ Mythical : fabulous. 



62 JOHN RUSK IN. 

— by one of whose princesses it was appointed that the 
Lawgiver of all the earth should be educated rather than 
by his own kindred ; — how that great Egyptian people, 
wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the 
form of a woman ; and into her hand, for a symbol, the 
weaver's shuttle : and how the name and the form of that 
spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, became 
that Athena of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to whose 
faith you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most 
precious in art, in literature, or in types of national virtue. 
But I will not wander into this distant and mythical 
element ; I will only ask you to give its legitimate value 
to the testimony of these great poets and men of the 
world, — consistent as you see it is on this head. I will 
ask you whether it can be supposed that these men, in the 
main work of their lives, are amusing themselves with a 
fictitious and idle view of the relations between man and 
woma^ ; — nay, worse than fictitious or idle ; for a thing 
may be imaginary, yet desirable, if it were possible ; but 
this, their ideal of women, is, according to our common 
idea of the marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The 
woman, we say, is not to guide, nor even to think for her- 
self. The man is always to be the wiser ; he is to be the 
thinker, the ruler, the superior in knowledge and discre- 
tion, as in power. Is it not somewhat important to make 
up our minds on this matter.? Are all these great men 
mistaken, or are we 1 Are Shakespeare and ^schylus,^ 
Dante and Homer, merely dressing dolls for us ; or, worse 
than dolls, unnatural visions, the realization of which, 
were it possible, would bring anarchy into all households 
and ruin into all affections } Nay, if you could suppose 

1 ^schylus (Es'ke-lus) : a celebrated Greek poet. 



BOOKS AND READING, 63 

this, take lastly the evidence of facts, given by the human 
heart itself. In all Christian ages which have been remark- 
able for their purity or progress, there has been absolute 
yielding of obedient devotion, by the lover, to his mistress. 
T say obedient — not merely enthusiastic and worshipping 
in imagination, but entirely subject, receiving from the 
beloved woman, however young, not only the encourage- 
ment, the praise, and the reward of all toil, but so far as 
any choice is open, or any question difficult of decision, 
the direction of all toil. That chivalry,^ to the abuse and 
dishonor of which are attributable primarily whatever is 
cruel in war, unjust in peace, or corrupt and ignoble in 
domestic relations ; and to the original purity and power 
of which we owe the defence alike of faith, of law, and of 
love; — that chivalry, I say, in its very first conception 
of honorable life, assumes the subjection of the young 
knight to the command — should it even be the command 
in caprice — of his lady. It assumes this, because its 
masters knew that the first and necessary impulse of every 
truly taught and knightly heart is this of blind service to 
its lady ; that where that true faith and captivity are not, 
all wayward and wicked passions must be ; and that in this 
rapturous obedience to the single love of his youth, is the 
sanctification of all man's strength, and the continuance 
of all his purposes. And this, not because such obedience 
would be safe, or honorable, were it ever rendered to the 
unworthy ; but because it ought to be impossible for every 
noble youth — it is impossible for every one rightly trained 
— to love any one whose gentle counsel he cannot trust, 
or whose prayerful command he can hesitate to obey. 

1 Chivalry : originally the qualifications required for knighthood, such as 
courtesy, valor, and dexterity in arms. 



64 JOHN RUSKIN. 

I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for I 
think it should commend itself at once to your knowledge 
of what has been and to your feelings of what should be. 
You cannot think that the buckling on of the knight's 
armor by his lady's hand was a mere caprice of romantic 
fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth — that the 
soul's armor is never well set to the heart unless a woman's 
hand has braced it ; and it is only when she braces it 
loosely that the honor of manhood fails. Know you not 
those lovely lines — I would they were learned by all 
youthful ladies of England : — 

" Ah, wasteful woman ! — she who may 
On her sweet self set her own jDrice, 
Knowing he cannot choose but pay — 
How has she cheapened Paradise ! 
How given for nought her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine, 
Which, spent with due, respective thrift. 
Had made brutes men, and men divine ! " ^ 

This much, then, respecting the relations of lovers I be- 
lieve you will accept. But what we too often doubt is the 
fitness of the continuance of such a relation throughout 
the whole of human life. We think it right in the lover 
and mistress, not in the husband and wife. That is to say, 
we think that a reverent and tender duty is due to one 
whose affection we still doubt, and whose character we as 
yet do but partially and distantly discern ; and that this 
reverence and duty are to be v/ithdrawn when the affection 
has become wholly and limitlessly our own, and the char- 
acter has been so sifted and tried that we fear not to 

1 Coventry Patmore, "The Angel in the House" — The Betrothal — Part 
VII., The Queen. 



BOOKS AND READING. 



6S 



entrust it with the happiness of our lives. Do you not see 
how ignoble this is as well as how unreasonable ? Do you 
not feel that marriage — when it is marriage at all, — is 
only the seal which marks the vowed transition of tem- 
porary into untiring service, and of fitful into eternal love ? 

But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding func- 
tion of the woman reconcilable with a true wifely subjec- 
tion ? Simply in that it is a guiding, not a determining, 
function. Let me try to show you briefly how these 
powers seem to be rightly distinguishable. 

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking 
of the "superiority" of one sex to the other, as if they 
could be compared in similar things. Each has what the 
other has not : each completes the other, and is completed 
by the other : they are in nothing alike, and the happiness 
and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiv- 
ing from the other what the other only can give. 

Now their separate characters are briefly these. The 
man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is emi- 
nently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. 

His intellect is for speculation and invention ; his en- 
ergy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war 
is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's 
power is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not 
for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrange- 
ment and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their 
claims and their places. Her great function is Praise : 
she enters into no contest, but infallibly judges the crown 
of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from 
all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work 
in open world, must encounter all peril and trial : — to him, 
therefore, the failure, the offence, the inevitable error: 



66 JOHN RUSKIN. 

often he must be wounded, or subdued, often misled, and 
always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; 
within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has 
sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause 
of error or offence. This is the true nature of home — it 
is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, 
but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is 
not this, it is not home : so far as the anxieties of the 
outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, 
unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is 
allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, 
it ceases to be home ; it is then only a part of that outer 
world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in. 
But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestaP temple, a tem- 
ple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before 
whose faces none may come but those whom they can 
receive with love, — so far as it is this, and roof and fire 
are types only of a nobler shade and light, — shade as of 
the rock in a weary land, and light as of the Pharos ^ in 
the stormy sea; — so far it vindicates the name, and ful- 
fils the praise, of home. 

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always 
round her. The stars only may be over her head ; the 
glow-worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at 
her foot : but home is yet wherever she is ; and for a noble 
woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with 
cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light 
far, for those who else were homeless. 

* Vestal : from Vesta, the virgin goddess of the domestic hearth ; hence 
pure, chaste. 

2 Pharos : originally a lighthouse built on the isle of Pharos, at the en- 
trance of the port of Alexandria, Egypt. In general, any ligiithouse. 



BOOKS AND READING. 6/ 

This, then, I believe to be, — will you not admit it to be, 
— the woman's true place and power ? But do not you 
see that to fulfil this, she must — as far as one can use 
such terms of a human creature — be incapable of error ? 
So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She 
must be enduringly, incorruptibly good ; instinctively, in- 
fallibly wise — wise, not for self-development, but for self- 
renunciation : wise, not that she may set herself above her 
husband, but that she may never fail from his side : wise, 
not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but 
with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, 
because infinitely applicable, modesty of service — the true 
changefulness of woman. In that great sense — " La 
donna e mobile," ^ not " Qual pium' al vento;"^ no, nor 
yet " Variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen 
made;"^ but variable as the light, manifold in fair and 
serene division, that it may take the color of all that it 
falls upon, and exalt it. 

II. I have been trying, thus far, to show you what 
should be the place, and what the power of woman. Now, 
secondly, we ask. What kind of education is to fit her for 
these } 

And if you indeed think this a true conception of her 
office and dignity, it will not be difficult to trace the course 
of education which would fit her for the one, and raise her 
to the other. 

The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful persons 
now doubt this, — is to secure for her such physical train- 
ing and exercise as may confirm her health, and perfect 

1 " La donna," etc. : " Woman is changeable." 

2 "Qual pium'," etc. : " Like a feather in the wind." 
^ Scott's Marmion, Canto VI. Stanza 30. 



6S JOHN RUSK IN. 

her beauty, the highest refinement of that beauty being 
unattainable without splendor of activity and of delicate 
strength. To perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its 
power ; it cannot be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light 
too far : only remember that all physical freedom is vain 
to produce beauty without a corresponding freedom of 
heart. There are two passages of that poet who is distin- 
guished, it seems to me, from all others — not by power, 
but by exquisite n^///ness — which point you to the source, 
and describe to you, in a few syllables, the completion of 
womanly beauty. I will read the introductory stanzas, but 
the last is the one I wish you specially to notice : 

" Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
Then nature said, a lovelier flower 

On earth was never sown. 
This child I to myself will take ; 
She shall be mine, and I will make 

A lady of my own. 

" Myself will to my darling be 
Both law and impulse ; and with me 

The girl, in rock and plain, 
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower 
Shall feel an overseeing power 
To kindle, or restrain. 

" The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her, for her the willow bend ; 

Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the storm, 
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 

By silent sympathy. 

" And vital feelings of delight 
Shall rear her form to stately height, — 



BOOKS AND READING. 69 

Her virgin bosom swell. 
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, 
While she and I together live, 

Here in this happy dell/' ^ 

" F/V<7/ feelings of delight," observe. There are deadly 
feelings of delight ; but the natural ones are vital, neces- 
sary to every life. 

And they must be feelings of delight, if they are to be 
vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely, if you do 
not make her happy. There is not one restraint you put 
on a good girl's nature — there is not one check you give 
to her instincts of affection or of effort — which will not 
be indelibly written on her features, with a hardness which 
is all the more painful because it takes away the bright- 
ness from the eyes of innocence, and the charm from the 
brow of virtue. 

This for the means : now note the end. Take from the 
same poet, in two lines, a perfect description of womanly 

beauty — 

"A countenance in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet." '^ 

The perfect loveliness of a woman's countenance can 
only consist in that majestic peace, which is founded in 
the memory of happy and useful years, — full of sweet 
records ; and from the joining of this with that yet more 
majestic childishness, which is still full of change and 
promise; — opening always — modest at once, and bright, 
with hope of better things to be won, and to be bestowed. 
There is no old age where there is still that promise — it 
is eternal youth. 

1 Wordsworth's Poems of the Imagination, X. 

2 Wordsworth's Poems of the Imagination, VIII, 



70 JOHN RUSK IN. 

Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical frame, 
and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, to fill 
and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts 
which tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and 
refine its natural tact of love. 

All such knowledge should be given her as may enable 
her to understand, and even to aid, the work of men : and 
yet it should be given, not as knowledge, — not as if it 
were, or could be, for her an object to know ; but only to 
feel, and to judge. It is of no moment, as a matter of 
pride or perfectness in herself, whether she knows many 
languages or one ; but it is of the utmost, that she should 
be able to show kindness to a stranger, and to understand 
the sweetness of a stranger's tongue. It is of no moment 
to her own worth or dignity that she should be acquainted 
with this science or that ; but it is of the highest that she 
should be trained in habits of accurate thought ; that she 
should understand the meaning, the inevitableness, and 
the loveliness of natural laws, and follow at least some one 
path of scientific attainment, as far as to the threshold of 
that bitter Valley of Humiliation, into which only the wis- 
est and bravest of men can descend, owning themselves 
for ever children, gathering pebbles on a boundless shore. 
It is of little consequence how many positions of cities 
she knows, or now many dates or events, or how many 
names of celebrated persons — it is not the object of 
education to turn a woman into a dictionary; but it is 
deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter with 
her whole personality into the history she reads ; to picture 
the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagination ; 
to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic circum- 
stances and dramatic relations, which the historian too 



BOOKS AND READING. 



71 



often only eclipses by his reasoning, and disconnects by 
his arrangement : it is for her to trace the hidden equities 
of divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness, 
of the fateful threads of woven fire that connect error with 
its retribution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to 
extend the limits of her sympathy with respect to that 
history which is being for her determined, as the moments 
pass in which she draws her peaceful breath : and to the 
contemporary calamity which, were it but rightly mourned 
by her, would recur no more hereafter. She is to exercise 
herself in imagining what would be the effects upon her 
mind and conduct, if she were daily brought into the pres- 
ence of the suffering which is not the less real because 
shut from her sight. She is to be taught somewhat to 
understand the nothingness of the proportion which that 
little world in which she lives and loves, bears to the world 
in which God lives and loves ; — and solemnly she is to be 
taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be fee- 
ble in proportion to the number they embrace, nor her 
prayer more languid than it is for the momentary relief 
from pain of her husband or her child, when it is uttered 
for the multitudes of those who have none to love them, — 
and is, "for all who are desolate and oppressed." 

If there were to be any difference between a girl's edu- 
cation and a boy's, I should say that of the two the girl 
should be earlier led, as her intellect ripens faster, into 
deep and serious subjects; and that her range of literature 
should be, not more, but less frivolous, calculated to add 
the qualities of patience and seriousness to her natural 
poignancy of thought and quickness of wit ; and also to 
keep her in a lofty and pure element of thought. I enter 
not now into any question of choice of books ; only be 



72 JOHN RUSK IN. 

sure that her books are not heaped up in her lap as they 
fall out of the package of the circulating library, wet with 
the last and lightest spray of the fountain of folly. 

Or even of the fountain of wit ; for with respect to that 
sore temptation of novel-reading, it is not the badness of a 
novel that we should dread, but its overwrought interest. 
The weakest romance is not so stupefying as the lower 
forms of religious exciting literature, and the worst ro- 
mance is not so corrupting as false history, false philoso- 
phy, or false political essays. But the best romance 
becomes dangerous, if, by its excitement, it renders the 
ordinary course of life uninteresting, and increases the 
morbid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in 
which we shall never be called upon to act. 

I speak therefore of good novels only ; and our modern 
literature is particularly rich in types of such. Well read, 
indeed, these books have serious use, being nothing less 
than treatises on moral anatomy and chemistry ; studies 
of human nature in the elements of it. But I attach little 
weight to this function : they are hardly ever read with 
earnestness enough to permit them to fulfil it. The ut- 
most they usually do is to enlarge somewhat the charity of 
a kind reader, or the bitterness of a malicious one; for 
each will gather, from the novel, food for her own disposi- 
tion. Those who are naturally proud and envious will 
learn from Thackeray to despise humanity; those who 
are naturally gentle, to pity it ; those who are naturally 
shallow, to laugh at it. So, also, there might be a service- 
able power in novels to bring before us, in vividness, a 
human truth which we had before dimly conceived ; but 
the temptation to picturesqueness of statement is so great, 
that often the best writers of fiction cannot resist it ; and 



BOOKS AND READING. 73 

our views are rendered so violent and one-sided, that their 
vitality is rather a harm than good. 

Without, however, venturing here on any attempt at 
decision how much novel-reading should be allowed, let 
me at least clearly assert this, that whether novels, or 
poetry, or history be read, they should be chosen, not for 
what is out of them, but for what is in them. The chance 
and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, or hide 
itself in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a noble 
girl ; but the emptiness of an author oppresses her, and 
his amiable folly degrades her. And if she can have 
access to a good library of old and classical books, there 
need be no choosing at all. Keep the modern magazine 
and novel out of your girl's way : turn her loose into the 
old library every wet day, and let her alone. She will find 
what is good for her; you cannot: for there is just this 
difference between the making of a girl's character and a 
boy's — you may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a 
rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as 
you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a 
girl into anything. She grows as a flower does, — she will 
wither without sun ; she will decay in her sheath, as the 
narcissus does, if you do not give her air enough ; she 
may fall, and defile her head in dust, if you leave her with- 
out help at some moments of her life ; but you cannot fet- 
ter her ; she must take her own fair form and way, if she 
take any, and in mind as in body, must have always 

" Her household motions light and free 
And steps of virgin liberty." ^ 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in a 

1 Wordsworth's Poems of the Imagination, VIII. 



74 JOHN RUSK IN. 

field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than 
you ; and the good ones too, and will eat some bitter and 
prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest 
thought were good. 

Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, and let 
her practice in all accomplishments be accurate and thor- 
ough, so as to enable her to understand more than she 
accomplishes. I say the finest models, — that is to say, 
the truest, simplest, usefullest. Note those epithets ; they 
will range through all the arts. Try them in music, where 
you might think them the least applicable. I say the 
truest, that in which the notes most closely and faithfully 
express the meaning of the words, or the character of 
intended emotion ; again, the simplest, that in which the 
meaning and melody are attained with the fewest and 
most significant notes possible; and, finally, the usefullest 
that music which makes the best words most beautiful, 
which enchants them in our memories each with its own 
glory of sound, and which applies them closest to the 
heart at the moment we need them. 

And not only in the material and in the course, but yet 
more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl's education be 
as serious as a boy's. You bring up your girls as if they 
were meant for sideboard ornaments, and then complain of 
their frivolity. Give them the same advantages that you 
give their brothers — appeal to the same grand instincts 
of virtue in them ; teach them also that courage and truth 
are the pillars of their being : do you think that they 
would not answer that appeal, brave and true as they are 
even now, when you know that there is hardly a girl's 
school in this Christian kingdom where the children's 
courage or sincerity would be thought of half so much im- 



BOOKS AND READING. 



7S 



portance as their way of coming in at a door ; and when 
the whole system of society, as respects the mode of estab- 
lishing them in life, is one rotten plague of cowardice and 
imposture — cowardice, in not daring to let them live, or 
love, except as their neighbors choose ; and imposture, in 
bringing, for the purpose of our own pride, the full glow 
of the world's worst vanity upon a girl's eyes, at the very 
period when the whole happiness of her future existence 
depends upon her remaining undazzled ? 

There is one more help which we cannot do without — 
one which, alone, has sometimes done more than all other 
influences besides, — the help of wild and fair nature. 
Hear this of the education of Joan of Arc : ^ 

'' The education of this poor girl was mean according to 
the present standard ; was ineffably grand, according to a 
purer philosophic standard ; and only not good for our 
age, because for us it would be un^tainable. . . . 

" Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to 
the advantages of her situation. The fountain of Dom- 
remy was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and it was 
haunted to that degree by fairies, that the parish priest 
{cure) was obliged to read mass there once a year, in order 
to keep them in any decent bounds. . . . 

"But the forests of Domremy — those were the glories 
of the land, for in them abode mysterious powers and 
ancient secrets that towered into tragic strength. 'Abbeys 
there were, and abbey windows,' — 'like Moorish temples 
of the Hindoos,' that exercised even princely power both 

1 Joan of Arc : a French peasant maid of the fifteenth century, who, by her 
bravery in battle, defeated the English at Orleans (Or'Ia-on) and elsewhere, 
and secured the crown to Charles VII. of France. She fell into the hands of 
the English in 1431, and was burned by them as a sorceress. 



76 • JOHN RUSK IN. 

in Touraine and in the German Diets.^ These had their 
sweet bells that pierced the forests for many a league at 
matins or vespers,^ and each its own dreamy legend. Few 
enough, and scattered enough, were these abbeys, so as in 
no degree to disturb the deep solitude of the region ; yet 
many enough to spread a network or awning of Christian 
sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen 
wilderness." * 

Now you cannot, indeed, have here in England, woods 
eighteen miles deep to the centre ; but you can, perhaps, 
keep a fairy or two for your children yet, if you wish to 
keep them. But do you wish it } Suppose you had each, 
at the back of your houses, a garden large enough for your 
children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give 
them room to run, — no more — and that you could not 
change your abode ; but that, if you chose, you could 
double your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal- 
shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower- 
beds into heaps of coke. Would you do it } I think not. 
I can tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it 
gave you income sixty-fold instead of four-fold. 

Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The 
whole country is but a little garden, not more than enough 
for your children to run on the lawns of, if you would let 
them all run there. And this little garden you will turn 
into furnace-ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, if you 
can ; and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for 
it. For the fairies will not be all banished; there are 



1 Diets : legislative assemblies, 

2 Matins or vespers : morning or evening prayers. 

* " Joan of Arc : in reference to M. Michelet's History of France." 
De Quincey's Works, Vol. III. p. 217. 



BOOKS AND READING. yy 

fairies of the furnace as of the wood, and their first gifts 
seem to be '* sharp arrows of the mighty " ; ^ but their last 
gifts are ''coals of juniper/' ^ 

And yet I cannot — though there is no part of my sub- 
ject that I feel more — press this upon you ; for we made 
so little use of the power of nature while we had it that 
we shall hardly feel what we have lost. Just on the other 
side of the Mersey you have your Snowdon,^ and your 
Menai Straits,^ and that mighty granite rock beyond the 
moors of Anglesea, splendid in its heatherly* crest, and 
foot planted in the deep sea, once thought of as sacred — 
a divine promontory, looking westward ; the Holy Head or 
Headland, still not without awe when its red light glares 
first through storm. These are the hills, and these the 
bays and blue inlets, which, among the Greeks, would 
have been always loved, always fateful in influence on the 
national mind. That Snowdon is your Parnassus ^ ; but 
where are its Muses ^ That Holyhead mountain is your 
Island of y^gina,^ but where is its Temple to Minerva.^ 

Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva had 
achieved under the shadow of our Parnassus, up to the 
year 1848.^ — Here is a little account of a Welsh school, 
from page 261 of the report on Wales, published by the 
Committee of Council on Education. This is a school 
close to a town containing 5000 persons : — 

1 Psalms cxx. 4, 

- Snowdon : the highest mountain in Wales. 

3 Menai (Men'i) : Menai Straits separate the island of Anglesea (Ang'- 
g'l-see) from the coast of Wales. 

* Heatherly : covered with heather. 

^ Parnassus : a mountain in Greece, the fabled abode of the god Apollo 
and the jSIuses. 

^ Island of ^gina : an island of Greece, once famous for its magnificent 
temples. 



yS JOHN RUSK IN, 

''I then called up a larger class, most of whom had 
recently come to the school. Three girls repeatedly de- 
clared they had never heard of Christ, and two that they 
had never heard of God. Two out of six thought Christ 
was on earth now (' they might have had a worse thought, 
perhaps ') ; three knew nothing about the crucifixion. 
Four out of seven did not know the names of the months, 
nor the number of days in a year. They had no notion of 
addition beyond two and two, or three and three ; their 
minds were perfect blanks.'* 

Oh, ye women of England ! from the Princess of that 
Wales to the simplest of you, do not think your own chil- 
dren can be brought into their true fold of rest while these 
are scattered on the hills, as sheep having no shepherd. 
And do not think your daughters can be trained to the 
truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, 
which God made at once for their school-room and their 
play-ground, lie desolate and defiled. You cannot bap- 
tize them rightly in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless 
you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great 
Lawgiver^ strikes forth for ever from the rocks of your 
native land — waters which a Pagan would have wor- 
shipped in their purity, and you only worship with pollu- 
tion. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those 
narrow axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark 
azure altars in heaven — the mountains that sustain your 
island throne, — mountains on which a Pagan would have 
seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud — 
remain for you without inscription ; altars built, not to, 
but by, an Unknown God.^ 

1 Lawg^iver: a name usually given to Moses (see Numbers xxi. i8 and xx. 
ii) ; but here used of the Creator. ^ See Acts xvii. 23. 



BOOKS AND READING. 79 

III. Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of the teach- 
ing, of woman, and thus of her household office, and queen- 
liness. We come now to our last, our widest question, — 
What is her queenly office with respect to the state ? 

Generally we are under an impression that a man's 
duties are public, and a woman's private. But this is not 
altogether so. A man has a personal work or duty, relat- 
ing to his own home, and a public work or duty, which is 
the expansion of the other, relating to the state. So a 
woman has a personal work and duty, relating to her own 
home, and a public work and duty, which is also the 
expansion of that. 

Now the man's work for his own home is, as has been 
said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and defence ; 
the woman's to secure its order, comfort, and loveliness. 

Expand both these functions. The man's duty, as a 
member of a commonwealth, is to assist in the mainte- 
nance, in the advance, in the defence of the state. The 
woman's duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is to 
assist in the ordering, in the comforting, and in the beau- 
tiful adornment of the state. 

What the man is at his own gate, defending it, if need 
be, against insult and spoil, that also, not in a less, but in 
a more devoted measure, he is to be at the gate of his 
country, leaving his home, if need be, even to the spoiler, 
to do his more incumbent work there. 

And, in like manner, what the woman is to be within 
her gates, as the centre of order, the balm of distress, and 
the mirror of beauty ; that she is also to be without her 
gates, where order is more difficult, distress more immi- 
nent, loveliness more rare. 

And as within the human heart there is always set an 



8o JOHN RUSK IN. 

instinct for all its real duties, — an instinct which you 
cannot quench, but only warp and corrupt if you with- 
draw it from its true purpose ; — as there is the intense 
instinct of love, which, rightly disciplined, maintains all 
the sanctities of life and, misdirected, undermines them ; 
and must do either the one or the other ; so there is in 
the human heart an inextinguishable instinct, the love of 
power, which, rightly directed, maintains all the majesty 
of law and life, and misdirected, wrecks them. 

Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of man, 
and of the heart of woman, God set it there, and God 
keeps it there. Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke 
the desire of power ! — For Heaven's sake, and for Man's 
sake, desire it all you can. But wJiat power .'' That is all 
the question. Power to destroy } the lion's limb, and the 
dragon's breath } Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to 
guide and to guard. Power of the sceptre and shield ; the 
power of the royal hand that heals in touching, — that 
binds the fiend and looses the captive ; the throne that is 
founded on the rock of Justice, and descended from only 
by steps of mercy. Will you not covet such power as 
this, and seek such throne as this, and be no more house- 
wives, but queens } 

It is now long, since the women of England arrogated, 
universally, a title which once belonged to nobility only, 
and, having once been in the habit of accepting the simple 
title of gentlewoman, as correspondent to that of gentle- 
man, insisted on the privilege of assuming the title of 
*' Lady," * which properly corresponds only to the title of 
"Lord." 

* I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted for our English youth 
of certain ranks, in which both boy and girl should receive, at a given age, 



BOOKS AND READING. 8 1 

I do not blame them for this ; but only for their narrow 
motive in this. I would have them desire and claim the 
title of Lady, provided they claim, not merely the title, 
but the office and duty signified by it. Lady means '* bread- 
giver" or "loaf-giver," and Lord means "maintainer of 
laws," and both titles have reference, not to the law which 
is maintained in the house, nor to the bread which is 
given to the household ; but to law maintained for the 
multitude, and to bread broken among the multitude. So 
that a Lord has legal claim only to his title in so far as he 
is the maintainer of the justice of the Lord of Lords ; and 
a Lady has legal claim to her title, only so far as she com- 
municates that help to the poor, representatives of her 
Master, which women once, ministering to Him of their 
substance, were permitted to extend to that Master Him- 
self ; and when she is known, as He Himself once was, in 
breaking of bread. 

And this beneficent and legal dominion, this power of 
the Dominus, or House Lord, and of the Domina, or 
House Lady, is great and venerable, not in the number 
of those through whom it has lineally descended, but in 
the number of those whom it grasps within its sway ; it 
is always regarded with reverent worship wherever its 
dynasty is founded on its duty, and its ambition co-relative 
with its beneficence. Your fancy is pleased with the 
thought of being noble ladies, with a train of vassals.^ 

their knighthood and ladyhood by true title ; attainabre only by certain pro- 
bation and trial both of character and accomplishment; and to be forfeited, 
on conviction, by their peers, of any dishonorable act. Such an institution 
would be entirely, and with all noble results, possible, in a nation which loved 
honor. That it would not be possible among us is not to the discredit of the 
scheme. * 

1 Vassals : dependents. 



82 JOHN RUSK IN. 

Be it so : you cannot be too noble, and your train cannot 
be too great ; but see to it that your train is of vassals 
whom you serve and feed, not merely of slaves who serve 
and feed yotc ; and that the multitude which obeys you is 
of those whom you have comforted, not oppressed, — whom 
you have redeemed, not led into captivity. 

And this, which is true of the lower or household do- 
minion, is equally true of the queenly dominion ; — that 
highest dignity is open to you, if you will also accept that 
highest duty. Rex et Regina ^ — Roi et Reine ^ — '^ Right- 
doers " ; they differ from the Lady and Lord, in that their 
power is supreme over the mind as over the person — that 
they not only feed and clothe, but direct and teach. And 
whether consciously or not, you must be, in many a heart, 
enthroned : there is no putting by that crown ; queens you 
must always be ; queens to your lovers ; queens to your 
husbands and your sons ; queens of higher mystery to the 
world beyond, which bows itself, and will for ever bow, be- 
fore the myrtle crown, and the stainless sceptre, of woman- 
hood. But, alas ! you are too often idle and careless 
queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you 
abdicate it in the greatest ; and leaving misrule and vio- 
lence to work their will among men, in defiance of the 
power, which, holding straight in gift from the Prince 
of all Peace, the wicked among you betray, and the good 
forget. 

''Prince of Peace." Note that name. When kings rule 
in that name, and nobles, and the judges of the earth, they 



1 Rex et Regina : king and queen, derived, probably, from rego, to direct 
or guide straight, hence to do right. 

* Roi et Reine : king and queen, French, derived from the Latin rex et 



BOOKS AND READING. 83 

also, in their narrow place, and mortal measure, receive the 
power of it. There are no other rulers than they : other 
rule than theirs is but ;;//j-rule ; they who govern verily 
*' Dei gratia" ^ are all princes, yes, or princesses, of peace. 
There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but 
you women are answerable for it ; not in that you have pro- 
voked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, by their 
nature, are prone to fight ; they will fight for any cause, or 
for none. It is for you to choose their cause for them, and 
to forbid them when there is no cause. There is no suffer- 
ing, no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the guilt of it 
lies lastly with you. Men can bear the sight of it, but 
you should not be able to bear it. Men may tread it down 
without sympathy in their own struggle ; but men are 
feeble in sympathy, and contracted in hope ; it is you only 
who can feel the depths of pain ; and conceive the way of 
its healing. Instead of trying to do this, you turn away 
from it ; you shut yourselves within your park walls and 
garden gates ; and you are content to know that there is 
beyond them a whole world in wilderness — a world of 
secrets which you dare not penetrate ; and of sufferings 
which you dare not conceive. 

I tell you that this is to me quite the most amazing 
among the phenomena of humanity. I am surprised at no 
depths to which, when once warped from its honor, that 
humanity can be degraded. I do not wonder at the miser's 
death, with his hands, as they relax, dropping gold. I do 
not wonder at the sensualist's life, with the shroud wrapped 
about his feet. I do not wonder at the single-handed mur- 
der of a single victim, done by the assassin in the darkness 
of the railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I do not 

^ Dei gratia : by the grace or favor of God. 



84 JOHN RUSK IN. 

even wonder at the myriad-handed murder of multitudes, 
done boastfully in the daylight, by the frenzy of nations, 
and the immeasurable, unimaginable guilt, heaped up from 
hell to heaven, of their priests, and kings. But this is 
wonderful to me — oh, how wonderful! — to see the ten- 
der and delicate woman among you, with her child at her 
breast, and a power, if she would wield it, over it, and over 
its father, purer than the air of heaven, and stronger than 
the seas of earth — nay, a magnitude of blessing which 
her husband would not part with for all that earth itself, 
though it were made of one entire and perfect chrysolite ^ : 
— to see her abdicate this majesty, to play at precedence 
with her next-door neighbor ! This is wonderful — oh, 
wonderful ! — to see her, with every innocent feeling fresh 
within her, go out in the morning into her garden to play 
with the fringes of its guarded flowers, and lift their heads 
when they are drooping, with her happy smile on her face, 
and no cloud upon her brow, because there is a little wall 
around her place of peace : and yet she knows, in her 
heart, if she would only look for its knowledge, that, out- 
side of that little rose-covered wall, the wild grass, to the 
horizon, is torn up by the agony of men, and beat level by 
the drift of their life-blood. 

Have you ever considered what a deep under meaning 
there lies, or at least may be read, if we choose, in our 
custom of strewing flowers before those whom we think 
most happy .? Do you suppose it is merely to deceive 
them into the hope that happiness is always to fall thus in 
showers at their feet 1 — that wherever they pass they will 
tread on herbs of sweet scent, and that the rough ground 
will be made smooth for them by depths of roses } So 

1 Chrysolite : a pale, yellowish-green, transparent gem. See Othello, 
Act V. Scene 2. 



BOOKS AND READING. 85 

surely as they believe that, they will have, instead, to walk 
on bitter herbs and thorns ; and the only softness to their 
feet will be of snow. But it is not thus intended they 
should believe ; there is a better meaning in that old cus- 
tom. The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with 
flowers : but they rise behind her steps, not before them. 
" Her feet have touched the meadows, and left the daisies 
rosy." ^ You think that only a lover's fancy; — false and 
vain ! How if it could be true ,? You think this also, per- 
haps, only a poet's fancy — 

" E'en the slight harebell raised its head 
Elastic from her airy tread." ^ 

But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does not 
destroy where she passes. She should revive ; the hare- 
bells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think I 
am going into a wild hyperbole ^ } Pardon me, not a whit 
— I mean what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute 
truth. You have heard it said — (and I believe there is 
more than fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a fan- 
ciful one) — that flowers only flourish rightly in the garden 
of some one who loves them. I know you would like that 
to be true ; you would think it a pleasant magic if you 
could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look 
upon them : nay, more, if your look had the power, not 
only to cheer, but to guard them — if you could bid the 
black blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillar spare — 
if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, 
and say to the south wind, in frost — '' Come, thou south, 

1 Tennyson's "Maud." 

2 Sir Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake, Canto I. 18. 

3 Hyperbole : exaggerated statement. 



86 JOHN RUSK IN. 

and breathe upon my garden, that the spices of it may flow 
out." ^ This you would think a great thing ? And do you 
think it not a greater thing, that all this (and how much 
more than this !) you can do, for fairer flowers than these 
— flowers that could bless you for having blessed them, 
and will love you for having loved them ; — flowers that 
have eyes like yours, and thoughts like yours, and lives like 
yours ; which, once saved, you save for ever ? Is this only 
a little power ? Far among the moorlands and the rocks, 
— far in the darkness of the terrible streets, — these feeble 
florets are lying, with all their fresh leaves torn, and their 
stems broken — will you never go down to them, nor set 
them in order in their little fragrant beds, nor fence them 
in their shuddering from the fierce wind ? Shall morning 
follow morning, for you, but not for them ; and the dawn 
rise to watch, far away, those frantic Dances of Death,^ 
but no dawn rise to breathe upon these living banks of 
wild violet, and woodbine, and rose ; nor call to you, 
through your casement, — call (not giving you the name 
of the English poet's lady, but the name of Dante's great 
Matilda,^ who on the edge of happy Lethe,* stood, wreath- 
ing flowers with flowers), saying : — 

*'Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown, 

1 See Solomon's Song, iv. i6. 
■ 2 Dances of Death : here, the pleasures of vice. 

3 Matilda: the Italian countess, Matilda, a benefactress of the Church. 

* Lethe (Le'the) : in Greek mythology, a river of the underworld. Whoso 
drank of its waters forgot the past. Here, however, Lethe is a stream in the 
terrestrial paradise of Dante's vision. Its waters have a double power — 

" Power to take away 
Remembrance of offence, ... to bring 
Remembrance back of every good deed done." 

— Dante's Purgatorio, xxix. 1 34. 



BOOKS AND READING. 

And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad 
And the musk of the roses blown P'"*! 



87 



Will you not go down among them? — among those 
sweet living things, whose new courage, sprung from the 
earth with the deep color of heaven upon it,, is starting up 
in strength of goodly spire ; and whose purity, washed from 
the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower of prom- 
ise ; — and still they turn to you, and for you, ''The Lark- 
spur listens — I hear, I hear ! And the Lily whispers — I 
wait." ^ 

Did you notice that I missed two lines when I read you 
that first stanza ; and think that I had forgotten them ? 
Hear them now : — 

*' Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown ; 
Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate, alone." i 

Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate of this 
sweeter garden, alone, waiting for you 1 Did you ever 
hear, not of a Maude, but a Madeleine,^ who went down to 
her garden in the dawn, and found one waiting at the gate, 
whom she supposed to be the gardener } Have you not 
sought Him often ; — sought Him in vain, all through the 
night ; — sought Him in vain at the gate of that old garden 
where the fiery sword is set }^ He is never there ; but at 
the gate of this garden he is waiting always — waiting to 
take your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of the 
valley, to see whether the vine has flourished, and the 

1 Tennyson's "Come into the Garden, Maud." 

2 Madeleine : the same as Magdalene. See John xx. 20. 
2 See Genesis iii. 24. 



88 JOHN RUSK IN. 

pomegranate budded. There you shall see with Him the 
little tendrils of the vines that His hand is guiding — there 
you shall see the pomegranate springing where his hand 
cast the sanguine seed ^ ; — more : you shall see the troops 
of the angel keepers, that, with their wings, wave away the 
hungry birds from the pathsides where He has sown, and 
call to each other between the vineyard rows, "Take us 
the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our 
vines have tender grapes."^ Oh — you queens — you 
queens ! among the hills and happy greenwood of this 
land of yours, shall the foxes have holes, and the birds of 
the air have nests ; and in your cities, shall the stones cry 
out against you, that they are the only pillows where the 
Son of Man can lay his head ? 

^ Sanguine seed : the seeds of the pomegranate have the appearance of 
being blood-red in color. 

^ See Solomon's Song, ii. 15. 



WAR.* 



I SHALL divide the war of which I would speak to you 
into three heads. War for exercise or play ; war for 
dominion ; and, war for defence. 

L And first, of war for exercise or play. I speak of it 
primarily in this light, because, through all past history, 
manly war has been more of an exercise than anything else, 
among the classes who cause, and proclaim it. It is not a 
game to the conscript ^ or the pressed sailor^ ; but neither 
of these are the causers of it. To the governor who deter- 
mines that war shall be, and to the youths who voluntarily 
adopt it as their profession, it has always been a grand pas- 
time ; and chiefly pursued because they had nothing else 
to do. And this is true without any exception. No king 
whose mind was fully occupied with the development of 
the inner resources of his kingdom, or with any other suf- 
ficing subject of thought, ever entered into war but on 
compulsion. No youth who was earnestly busy with any 
peaceful subject of study, or set on any serviceable course 
of action, ever voluntarily became a soldier. Occupy him 
early and wisely, in agriculture or business, in science or 
in literature, and he will never think of war otherwise than 
as a calamity. But leave him idle ; and, the more brave 

* From the Lecture on War in the " Crown of Wild Olive." 

1 Conscript : a man drafted or compelled by law to enter the army. 

2 Pressed sailor : a man seized by the press-gang and forced to enter the 
navy. 



QO JOHN RUSK IN. 

and active and capable he is by nature, the more he will 
thirst for some appointed field for action ; and find, in the 
passion and peril of battle, the only satisfying fulfilment of 
his unoccupied being. And from the earliest incipient 
civilization until now, the population of the earth divides 
itself, when you look at it widely, into two races ; one of 
workers, and the other of players — one tilHng the ground, 
manufacturing, building, and otherwise providing for the 
necessities of life ; — the other part proudly idle, and con- 
tinually therefore needing recreation, in which they use 
the productive and laborious orders partly as their cattle, 
and partly as their puppets or pieces in the game of death. 

Now, remember, whatever virtue or goodliness there 
may be in this game of war, rightly played, there is none 
when you thus play it with a multitude of small human 
pawns. ^ 

If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, 
choose to make your pastime of contest, do so, and wel- 
come ; but set not up these unhappy peasant-pieces upon 
the green fielded board. If the wager is to be of death, 
lay it on your own heads, not theirs. A goodly struggle 
in the Olympic ^ dust, though it be the dust of the grave, 
the gods will look upon, and be with you in ; but they will 
not be with you, if you sit on the sides of the amphi- 
theatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth, whose 
arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladia- 
torial war.3 You also, you tender and delicate women, for 
whom, and by whose command, all true battle has been, 

1 Pawns : common men or pieces used in playing chess. 

2 Olympic (from Olympus, a mountain range in Greece, thought to be the 
abode of Jupiter) : relating to the Olympic games — the greatest of the Greek 
festivals — held in honor of Jupiter. 

3 Gladiatorial war: here, war fought for the entertainment of kings. 



IVAJ^. 91 

and must ever be ; you would perhaps shrink now, though 
you need not, from the thought of sitting as queens above 
set lists 1 where the jousting ^ game might be mortal. How 
much more, then, ought you to shrink from the thought of 
sitting above a theatre pit in which even a few condemned 
slaves were slaying each other only for your delight ! And 
do you ;/<?/ shrink from the fac^ of sitting above a theatre 
pit, where, — not condemned slaves, — but the best and 
bravest of the poor sons of your people, slay each other, — 
not man to man, — as the coupled gladiators ; but race to 
race, in duel of generations ? You would tell me, perhaps, 
that you do not sit to see this ; and it is indeed true, that 
the women of Europe — those who have no heart-interest 
of their own at peril in the contest — draw the curtains of 
their boxes, and muffle the openings ; so that from the pit 
of the circus of slaughter there may reach them only at 
intervals a half-heard cry and a murmur as of the wind's 
sighing, when myriads of souls expire. They shut out the 
death-cries ; and are happy, and talk wittily among them- 
selves. That is the utter literal fact of what our ladies do 
in their pleasant lives. 

Nay, you might answer, speaking for them — * We do 
not let these wars come to pass for our play, nor by our 
carelessness ; we cannot help them. How can any final 
quarrel of nations be settled otherwise than by war } ' I 
cannot now delay to tell you how political quarrels might 
be otherwise settled. But grant that they cannot. Grant 
that no law of reason can be understood by nations ; no 
law of justice submitted to by them ; and that, while ques- 
tions of a few acres, and of petty cash, can be determined 

1 Lists : an enclosure for a tournament, or jousting. 

2 Jousting : a mock battle between two knights. 



92 JOHN RUSK IN. 

by truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in 
the perishing or saving of kingdoms can be determined 
only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle. 
Grant this, and even then, judge if it will always be neces- 
sary for you to put your quarrel into the hearts of your 
poor, and sign your treaties with peasants' blood. You 
would be ashamed to do this in your own private position 
and power. Why should you not be ashamed also to do it 
in public place and power } If you quarrel with your neigh- 
bor, and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, and mortal, 
you and he do not send your footmen to Battersea Fields^ 
to fight it out ; nor do you set fire to his tenants' cottages, 
nor spoil their goods. You fight out your quarrel your- 
selves, and at your own danger, if at all. And you do not 
think it materially affects the arbitrament that one of you 
has a larger household than the other ; so that, if the ser- 
vants or tenants were brought into the field with their 
masters, the issue of the contest could not be doubtful } 
You either refuse the private duel, or you practise it under 
laws of honor, not of physical force ; that so it may be, in 
a manner, justly concluded. Now the just or unjust con- 
clusion of the private feud is of little moment, while the 
just or unjust conclusion of the public feud is of eternal 
moment : and yet, in this public quarrel, you take your 
servants' sons from their arms to fight for it, and your ser- 
vants' food from their lips to support it ; and the black 
seals on the parchment of your treaties of peace are the 
deserted hearth and the fruitless field. There is a ghastly 
ludicrousness in this, as there is mostly in these wide and 
universal crimes. Hear the statement of the very fact of 

1 Battersea Fields : formerly, one of the dreariest spots in the suburbs of 
London, Duels were occasionally fought there. It is now one of the most 
beautiful parks (Battersea Park) of the metropolis. 



it in the most literal words of the greatest of our English 
thinkers : — 

''What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net- 
purport and upshot of war ? To my own knowledge, for 
example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dum- 
drudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by 
certain 'natural enemies' of the French, there are succes- 
sively selected, during the French war, say thirty able- 
bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled 
and nursed them ; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, 
fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, 
so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, 
and the weakest can stand under thirty stone ^ avoirdupois. 
Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are 
selected, all dressed in red, and shipped away, at the pub- 
lic charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the 
south of Spain, and fed there till wanted. 

''And now to that same spot in the south of Spain 
are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dum- 
drudge, in like manner wending ; till at length, after in- 
finite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition ; 
and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his 
hand. 

'' Straightway the word ' Fire ! ' is given, and they blow 
the souls out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk, 
useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which 
it must bury, and anon ^ shed tears for. Had these men 
any quarrel ? Busy as the devil is, not the smallest ! 
They lived far enough apart ; were the entirest strangers ; 
nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, 
by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. 

1 Stone : a weight of fourteen pounds. 

^ Anon : forthwith, present!}'; also afterward. 



94 JOHN RUSK IN. 

How then ? Simpleton ! their governors had fallen out ; 
and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to 
make these poor blockheads shoot." ^ 

II. I pass now to our second order of war, the common- 
est among men, — that undertaken in desire of dominion. 
And let me ask you to think for a few moments what the 
real meaning of this desire of dominion is — first in the 
minds of kings — then in that of nations. 

Now, mind you this first, — that I speak either about 
kings, or masses of men, with a fixed conviction that 
human nature is a noble and beautiful thing ; not a foul 
nor a base thing. All the sin of men I esteem as their dis- 
ease, not their nature ; as a folly which may be prevented, 
not a necessity which must be accepted. And my wonder, 
even when things are at their worst, is always at the height 
which this human nature can attain. Thinkinir it hio^h, I 
find it always a higher thing than I thought it ; while those 
who think it low, find it, and will find it, always lower than 
they thought it : the fact being, that it is infinite, and 
capable of infinite height and infinite fall ; but the nature 
of it — and here is the faith which I would have you hold 
with me — the nature of it is in the nobleness, not in the 
catastrophe. 

Take the faith in its utmost terms. When the captain 
of the "London" shook hands with his mate, saying, "God 
speed you ! I will go down with my passengers," tJiat I 
believe to be "human nature." He does not do it from 
any religious motive — from any hope of reward, or any 
fear of punishment ; he does it because he is a man. But 
when a mother, living among the fair fields of merry Eng- 
land, gives her two-year-old child to be suffocated under a 
mattress in her inner room, while the said mother waits and 

1 Carlyle's " Sartor Resartus." 



WAR. 



95 



talks outside ; that I believe to be not human nature. You 
have the two extremes there, shortly. And you, men, and 
mothers, who are here face to face with me to-night, I call 
upon you to say which of these is human and which inhuman 
— which *' natural " and which " unnatural" .-^ Choose your 
creed at once, I beseech you — choose it with unshaken 
choice — choose it for ever. Will you take, for foundation 
of act and hope, the faith that this man was such as God 
made him, or that this woman was such as God made her.^ 
Which of them has failed from their nature — from their 
present, possible, actual nature ; — not their nature of long 
ago, but their nature of now .'* Which has betrayed it — 
falsified it .'' Did the guardian who died in his trust, die 
inhumanly, and as a fool ; and did the murderess of her 
child fulfil the law of her being 1 Choose, I say ; infini- 
tude of choices hang upon this. You have had false 
prophets among you — for centuries you have had them — 
solemnly warned against them though you were; false 
prophets, who have told you that all men are nothing but 
fiends, o^ wolves, half beast, half devil. Believe that, and 
indeed you may sink to that. But refuse that, and have 
faith that God ''made you upright," though yoic have 
sought out many inventions ; so, you will strive daily to 
become more what your Maker meant and means you to 
be, and daily gives you also the power to be — and you 
will cling more and more to the nobleness and virtue that 
is in you, saying, " My righteousness I hold fast, and will 
not let it go." ^ 

I have put this to you as a choice, as if you might hold 
either of these creeds you liked best. But there is in reality 
no choice for you ; the facts being quite easily ascertainable. 

1 Job xxvii. 6. 



96 JOHN RUSK IN. 

You have no business to think about this matter, or to 
choose in it. The broad fact is, that a human creature of 
the highest race, and most perfect as a human thing, is 
invariably both kind and true ; and that as you lower the 
race, you get cruelty and falseness, as you get deformity : 
and this so steadily and assuredly, that the two great words 
which, in their first use, meant only perfection of race, have 
come, by consequence of the invariable connection of virtue 
with the fine human nature, both to signify benevolence of 
disposition. The word generous, and the word gentle, both, 
in their origin, meant only "of pure race," but because 
charity and tenderness are inseparable from this purity of 
blood, the words which once stood only for pride, now stand 
as synonyms for virtue. 

Now, this being the true power of our inherent humanity, 
and seeing that all the aim of education should be to develop 
this, — and seeing, also, what magnificent self-sacrifice the 
higher classes of men are capable of, for any cause that they 
understand or feel, — it is wholly inconceivable to me how 
well-educated princes, who ought to be of all gentlemen the 
gentlest, and of all nobles the most generous, and whose 
title of royalty means only their function of doing every 
man '' right ^ — how these, I say, throughout history, should 
so rarely pronounce themselves on the side of the poor and 
of justice, but continually maintain themselves and their 
own interests by oppression of the poor, and by wresting 
of justice ; and how this should be accepted as so natural, 
that the word loyalty, which means faithfulness to law, is 
used as if it were only the duty of a people to be loyal to 
their king, and not the duty of a king to be infinitely more 
loyal to his people. How comes it to pass that a captain 
will die with his passengers, and lean over the gunwale to 



give the parting boat its course ; but that a king will not 
usually die with, much less for, his passengers, — thinks it 
rather incumbent on his passengers, in any number, to die 
iox Iiimf Think, I beseech you, of the wonder of this. 
The sea captain, not captain by divine right, but only by 
company's appointment ; — not a man of royal descent, but 
only a plebeian who can steer ; — not with the eyes of the 
world upon him, but with feeble chance, depending on one 
poor boat, of his name being ever heard above the wash of 
the fatal waves; — not with the cause of a nation resting 
on his act, but helpless to save so much as a child from 
among the lost crowd with whom he resolves to be lost, — 
yet goes down quietly to his grave, rather than break his 
faith to these few emigrants. But your captain by divine 
right, — your captain with the hues of a hundred shields of 
kings upon his breast, — your captain whose every deed, 
brave or base, will be illuminated or branded for ever 
before unescapable eyes of men, — your captain whose 
every thought and act are beneficent, or fatal, from sun- 
rising to setting, blessing as the sunshine, or shadowing 
as the night, — this captain, as you find him in history, for 
the most part thinks only how he may tax his passengers, 
and sit at most ease in his state cabin ! 

For observe, if there had been indeed in the hearts of the 
rulers of great multitudes of men any such conception of 
work for the good of those under their command, as there 
is in the good and thoughtful masters of any small company 
of men, not only wars for the sake of mere increase of power 
could never take place, but our idea of power itself would 
be entirely altered. Do you suppose that to think and act 
even for a million of men, to hear their complaints, watch 
their weaknesses, restrain their vices, make laws for them, 



98 JOHN RUSK IN. 

lead them, day by day, to purer life, is not enough for one 
man's work ? If any of us were absolute lord only of a 
district of a hundred miles square, and were resolved on 
doing our utmost for it ; making it feed as large a number 
of people as possible ; making every clod productive, and 
every rock defensive, and every human being happy ; should 
we not have enough on our hands think you ? But if the 
ruler has any other aim than this ; if, careless of the result 
of his interference, he desire only the authority to inter- 
fere ; and, regardless of what is ill-done or well-done, cares 
only that it shall be done at his bidding ; — if he would 
rather do two hundred miles' space of mischief, than one 
hundred miles' space of good, of course he will try to add 
to his territory ; and to add inimitably. But does he add 
to his power? Do you call it power in a child, if he is 
allowed to play with the wheels and bands of some vast 
engine, pleased with their murmur and whirl, till his unwise 
touch, wandering where it ought not, scatters beam and 
wheel into ruin ? Yet what machine is so vast, so incog- 
nisable, ^ as the working of the mind of a nation ; what 
child's touch so wanton, as the word of a selfish king? And 
yet, how long have we allowed the historian to speak of 
the extent of the calamity a man causes, as a just ground 
for his pride ; and to extol him as the greatest prince, who 
is only the centre of the widest error. Follow out this 
thought by yourselves ; and you will find that all power, 
properly so called, is wise and benevolent. There may be 
capacity in a drifting fire-ship to destroy a fleet ; there may 
be venom enough in a dead body to infect a nation. But 
which of you, the most ambitious, would desire a drifting 
kinghood, robed in consuming fire, or a poison-dipped 
1 Incognisable : unknowable. 



sceptre whose touck was mortal ? There is no true 
potency, remember, but that of help ; no true ambition, 
but ambition to save. 

And then, observe farther, this true power, the power of 
saving, depends neither on multitude of men, nor on extent 
of territory. We are continually assuming that nations 
become strong according to their numbers. They indeed 
become so, if those numbers can be made of one mind ; but 
how are you sure you can stay them in one mind, and keep 
them from having north and south minds ? Grant them 
unanimous, how know you they will be unanimous in right ? 
If they are unanimous in wrong, the more they are, essen- 
tially the weaker they are. Or, suppose that they can 
neither be of one mind, nor of two minds, but can only 
be of 7io mind ? Suppose they are a mere helpless mob, 
tottering into precipitant catastrophe, like a wagon load 
of stones when the wheel comes off. Dangerous enough 
for their neighbors, certainly, but not ''powerful." 

Neither does strength depend on extent of territory, any 
more than upon number of population. Take up your maps 
when you go home this evening, put the cluster of British 
Isles beside the mass of South America; and then consider 
whether any race of men need care how much ground they 
stand upon. The strength is in the men, and in their unity 
and virtue, not in their standing room : a little group of 
wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools ; and 
only that nation gains true territory, which gains itself. 

And now for the brief practical outcome of all this. 
Remember, no government is ultimately strong, but in pro- 
portion to its kindness and justice ; and that a nation does 
not strengthen, by merely multiplying and diffusing itself. 
We have not strengthened as yet, by multiplying into 



lOO JOHN RUSK IN. 

America. Nay, even when it has not to encounter the 
separating conditions of emigration, a nation need not 
boast itself of multiplying on its own ground, if it multi- 
plies only as flies or locusts do, with the god of flies for 
its god. It multiplies its strength only by increasing as 
one great family, in perfect fellowship and brotherhood. 
And lastly, it does not strengthen itself by seizing domin- 
ion over races whom it cannot benefit. Austria is not 
strengthened, but weakened, by her grasp of Lombardy ; 
and whatever apparent increase of majesty and of wealth 
may have accrued to us from the possession of India, 
whether these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, 
depends wholly on the degree in which our influence on 
the native race shall be benevolent and exalting. But, as 
it is at their own peril that any race extends their dominion 
in mere desire of power, so it is at their own still greater 
peril that they refuse to undertake aggressive war, accord- 
ing to their force, whenever they are assured that their 
authority would be helpful and protective. Nor need you 
listen to any sophistical objection of the impossibility of 
knowing when a people's help is needed, or when not. 
Make your national conscience clean, and your national 
eyes will soon be clear. No man who is truly ready to 
take part in a noble quarrel will ever stand long in doubt 
by whom, or in what cause, his aid is needed. I hold it 
my duty to make no political statement of any special 
bearing in this presence ; but I tell you broadly and 
boldly, that, within these last ten years, we English have, 
as a knightly nation, lost our spurs : ^ we have fought 

1 Spurs : spurs were the special mark or badge of knighthood. When a 
kijight committed a base action and was publicly expelled from his order, his 
spurs were taken from him; hence to " lose his spurs " was to lose his honor. 



WAR. 10 1 

where we should not have fought, for gain ; and we have 
been passive where we should not have been passive, for 
fear. I tell you that the principle of non-intervention, as 
now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as the worst 
frenzy of conquest, and differs from it only by being not 
only malignant, but dastardly. 

I know, however, that my opinions on this subject differ 
too widely from those ordinarily held, to be any farther 
intruded upon you ; and therefore I pass lastly to examine 
the conditions of the third kind of noble war ; — war 
waged simply for defence of the country in which we were 
born, and for the maintenance and execution of her laws, 
by whomsoever threatened or defied. It is to this duty 
that I suppose most men entering the army consider them- 
selves in reality to be bound, and I want you now to reflect 
what the laws of mere defence are ; and what the soldier's 
duty, as now understood, or supposed to be understood. 
You have solemnly devoted yourselves to be English 
soldiers, for the guardianship of England. I want you to 
feel what this vow of yours indeed means, or is gradually 
coming to mean. You take it upon you, first, while you 
are sentimental schoolboys ; you go into your military con- 
vent, or barracks, just as a girl goes into her convent while 
she is a sentimental schoolgirl ; neither of you then know 
what you are about, though both the good soldiers and 
good nuns make the best of it afterwards. You don't un- 
derstand perhaps why I call you "sentimental " schoolboys, 
when you go into the army } Because, on the whole, it is 
love of adventure, of excitement, of fine dress and of the 
pride of fame, all which are sentimental motives, which 
chiefly make a boy like going into the Guards better than 
into a counting-house. You fancy, perhaps, that there is a 



I02 JOHN RUSK IN. 

severe sense of duty mixed with these peacocky motives ? 
And in the best of you, there is ; but do not think that it 
is principal. If you cared to do your duty to your country 
in a prosaic and unsentimental way, depend upon it, there 
is now truer duty to be done in raising harvests, than in 
burning them ; more in building houses, than in shelling 
them — more in winning money by your own work, where- 
with to help men, than in taxing other people's work, for 
money wherewith to slay men ; more duty finally, in 
honest and unselfish living than in honest and unselfish 
dying, though that seems to your boys' eyes the bravest. 
So far then, as for your own honor, and the honor of your 
families, you choose brave death in a red coat before brave 
life in a black one, you are sentimental ; and now see what 
this passionate vow of yours comes to. For a little while 
you ride, and you hunt tigers or savages, you shoot, and 
are shot ; you are happy, and proud, always, and honored 
and wept if you die ; and you are satisfied with your life, 
and with the end of it; believing, on the whole, that good 
rather than harm of it comes to others, and much pleasure 
to you. But as the sense of duty enters into your form- 
ing minds, the vow takes another aspect. You find that 
you have put yourselves into the hand of your country as 
a weapon. You have vowed to strike, when she bids you, 
and to stay scabbarded when she bids you ; all that you 
need answer for is, that you fail not in her grasp. And 
there is goodness in this, and greatness, if you can trust 
the hand and heart of the Britomart who has braced you 
to her side, and are assured that when she leaves you 
sheathed in darkness, there is no need for your flash to 
the sun. But remember, good and noble as this state 
may be, it is a state of slavery. There are different kinds 



tVAJ?. 



103 



of slaves and different masters. Some slaves are scourged 
to their work by whips, others are scourged to it by rest- 
lessness or ambition. It does not matter what the whip 
is ; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut 
thongs for it out of your own souls : the fact, so far, of 
slavery, is in being driven to your work without thought, 
at another's bidding. Again, some slaves are bought with 
money, and others with praise. It matters not what the 
purchase-money is. The distinguishing sign of slavery is 
to have a price, and be bought for it. Again, it matters 
not what kind of work you are set on ; some slaves are set 
to forced diggings, others to forced marches ; some dig 
furrows, others field-works, and others graves. Some 
press the juice of reeds, and some the juice of vines, and 
some the blood of men. The fact of the captivity is the 
same whatever work we are set upon, though the fruits of 
the toil may be different. But, remember, in thus vowing 
ourselves to be the slaves of any master, it ought to be 
some subject of forethought with us, what work he is 
likely to put us upon. You may think that the whole 
duty of a soldier is to be passive, that it is the country 
you have left behind who is to command, and you have 
only to obey. But are you sure that you have left a/l 
your country behind, or that the part of it you have so 
left is indeed the best part of it .-* Suppose — and, re- 
member, it is quite conceivable — that you yourselves are 
indeed the best part of England ; that you, who have be- 
come the slaves, ought to have been the masters ; and that 
those who are the masters, ought to have been the slaves ! 
If it is a noble and whole-hearted England, whose bidding 
you are bound to do, it is well ; but if you are yourselves 
the best of her heart, and the England you have left be but 



104 JOHN RUSK IN. 

a half-hearted England, how say you of your obedience? 
You were too proud to become shopkeepers : are you sat- 
isfied then to become the servants of shopkeepers ? You 
were too proud to become merchants er farmers your 
selves : will you have merchants or farmers then for your 
field-marshals? You had no gifts of special grace for 
Exeter Hall ^ : will you have some gifted person thereat 
for your commander-in-chief, to judge of your work, and 
reward it ? You imagine yourselves to be the army of 
England : how if you should find yourselves, at last, only 
the police of her manufacturing towns, and the beadles ^ 
of her little Bethels ^ ? 

It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for ever ; but 
what I want you to see, and to be assured of, is, that the 
ideal of soldiership is not mere passive obedience and 
bravery ; that, so far from this, no country is in a healthy 
state which has separated, even in a small degree, her 
civil from her military power. All states of the world, 
however great, fall at once when they use mercenary 
armies ; and although it is a less instant form of error 
(because involving no national taint of cowardice), it is 
yet an error no less ultimately fatal — it is the error es- 
pecially of modern times, of which we cannot yet know all 
the calamitous consequences — to take away the best 
blood and strength of the nation, all the soul-substance of 
it that is brave, and careless of reward, and scornful of 
pain, and faithful in trust ; and to cast that into steel, and 
make a mere sword of it ; taking away its voice and will ; 

1 Exeter Hall : a large hall in London where many religious and charita- 
ble societies hold their anniversary meetings; the name is sometimes used 
satirically as a synonym for fanaticism and hypocrisy. 

2 Beadles : petty parish or church officers. 

8 Bethels : cheap chapels for congregations of small means. 



IVA/^. 105 

but to keep the worst part of the nation — whatever is 
cowardly, avaricious, sensual, and faithless — and to give 
to this the voice, to this the authority, to this the chief 
privilege, where there is least capacity, of thought. The 
fulfilment of your vow for the defence of England will by 
no means consist in carrying out such a system. A 
soldier's vow to his country is that he will die for the 
guardianship of her domestic virtue, of her righteous laws, 
and of her anyway challenged or endangered honor. A 
state without virtue, without laws, and without honor, he 
is bound ;/^/ to defend ; nay, bound to redress by his own 
right hand that which he sees to be base in her. So 
sternly is this the law of Nature and life, that a nation 
once utterly corrupt can only be redeemed by a military 
despotism — never by talking, nor by its free effort. And 
the health of any state consists simply in this : that in it, 
those who are wisest shall also be strongest ; its rulers 
should be also its soldiers ; or, rather, by force of intellect 
more than of sword, its soldiers its rulers. Whatever the 
hold which the aristocracy of England has on the heart of 
England, in that they are still always in front of her 
battles, this hold will not be enough, unless they are also 
in front of her thoughts. 

And now, remember, you soldier youths, that your fit- 
ness for all future trust depends upon what you are now. 
No good soldier in his old age was ever careless or indolent 
in his youth. Many a giddy and thoughtless boy has 
become a good bishop, or a good lawyer, or a good mer- 
chant ; but no such an one ever became a good general. 
I challenge you, in all history, to find a record of a good 
soldier who was not grave and earnest in his youth. And, 
in general, I have no patience with people who talk about 



I06 JOHN RUSK IN. 

'the thoughtlessness of youth ' indulgently. I had infinitely 
rather hear of thoughtless old age, and the indulgence due 
to that. When a man has done his work, and nothing can 
any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his 
toil, and jest with his fate, if he will ; but what excuse can 
you find for wilfulness of thought, at the very time when 
every crisis of future fortune hangs on your decisions ? A 
youth thoughtless ! when all the happiness of his home for 
ever depends on the chances, or the passions, of an hour ? 
A youth thoughtless ! when the career of all his days 
depends on the opportunity of a moment ! A youth 
thoughtless ! when his every act is a foundation-stone of 
future conduct, and every imagination a fountain of life 
or death ! Be thoughtless in any after years, rather 
than now — though, indeed, there is only one place where 
a man may be nobly thoughtless, — his deathbed. No 
thinking should ever be left to be done there. 

Having, then, resolved that you will not waste reck- 
lessly, but earnestly use, these early days of yours, re- 
member that all the duties of her children to England 
may be summed in two words — industry and honor. I 
say first, industry, for it is in this that soldier youth are 
especially tempted to fail. Yet, surely, there is no reason, 
because your life may possibly or probably be shorter than 
other men's, that you should therefore waste more reck- 
lessly the portion of it that is granted you ; neither do the 
duties of your profession, which require you to keep your 
bodies strong, in any way involve the keeping of your 
minds weak. So far from that, the experience, the hard- 
ship, and the activity of a soldier's life render his powers 
of thought more accurate than those of other men ; and 
while, for others, all knowledge is often little more than a 



PVAJ?. 107 

means of amusement, there is no form of science which a 
soldier may not at some time or other find bearing on 
business of life and death. A young mathematician may 
be excused for languor in studying curves to be described 
only with a pencil ; but not in tracing those which are to 
be described with a rocket. Your knowledge of a whole- 
some herb may involve the feeding of an army ; and 
acquaintance with an obscure point of geography, the 
success of a campaign. Never waste an instant's time, 
therefore ; the sin of idleness is a thousand-fold greater in 
you than in other youths ; for the fates of those who will 
one day be under your command hang upon your knowl- 
edge ; lost moments now will be lost lives then, and every 
instant which you carelessly take for play, you buy with 
blood. But there is one way of wasting time, of all the 
vilest, because it wastes, not time only, but the interest 
and energy of your minds. Of all the ungentlemanly 
habits into which you can fall, the vilest is betting, or 
interesting yourselves in the issues of betting. It unites 
nearly every condition of folly and vice ; you concentrate 
your interest upon a matter of chance, instead of upon a 
subject of true knowledge ; and you back opinions which 
you have no grounds for forming, merely because they are 
your own. All the insolence of egotism is in this ; and so 
far as the love of excitement is complicated with the hope 
of winning money, you turn yourselves into the basest 
sort of tradesmen — those who live by speculation. Were 
there no other ground for industry, this would be a suffi- 
cient one ; that it protected you from the temptation to 
so scandalous a vice. Work faithfully, and you will put 
yourselves in possession of a glorious and enlarging hap- 



I08 JOHN RUSK IN. 

piness ; not such as can be won by the speed of a horse, 
or marred by the obliquity of a ball. 

First, then, by industry you must fulfil your vow to your 
country ; but all industry and earnestness will be useless 
unless they are consecrated by your resolution to be in all 
things men of honor; not honor in the common sense only, 
but in the highest. Rest on the force of the two main 
words in the great verse, integer vitae, scelerisque ptirus} 
You have vowed your life to England ; give it to her 
wholly — a bright, stainless, perfect life — a knightly life. 
Because you have to fight with machines instead of lances, 
there may be a necessity for more ghastly danger, but 
there is none for less worthiness of character, than in olden 
time. You may be true knights yet, though perhaps not * 
equites^ you may have to call yourselves * cannonry ' in- 
stead of ' chivalry,' but that is no reason why you should 
not call yourselves true men. So the first thing you have 
to see to in becoming soldiers is that you make yourselves 
wholly true. Courage is a mere matter of course among 
any ordinarily well-born youths ; but neither truth nor gen- 
tleness is matter of course. You must bind them like 
shields about your necks ; you must write them on the 
tables of your hearts. Though it be not exacted of you, 
yet exact it of yourselves, this vow of stainless truth. 
Your hearts are, if you leave them unstirred, as tombs in 
which a god lies buried. Vow yourselves crusaders to re- 
deem that sacred sepulchre. And remember, before all 
things — for no other memory will be so protective of you 

1 Integer vitae, etc. : " The man whose life has no flaw, pure from guile." 
Horace, Odes, I. 22. 

2 Equites : originally an honorable body of Roman cavalry. 



WAR. 



109 



— that the highest law of this knightly truth is that under 
which it is vowed to women. Whomsoever else you de- 
ceive, whomsoever you injure, whomsoever you leave un- 
aided, you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided, 
according to your power, any woman of whatever rank. 
Believe me, every virtue of the higher phases of manly 
character begins in this; — in truth and modesty before 
the face of all maidens ; in truth and pity, or truth and 
reverence, to all womanhood. 

And now let me turn for a moment to you, — wives and 
maidens, who are the souls of soldiers; to you — mothers, 
who have devoted your children to the great hierarchy^ of 
war. Let me ask you to consider what part you have to 
take for the aid of those who love you ; for if you fail in 
your part, they cannot fulfil theirs ; such absolute help- 
mates you are that no man can stand without that help, 
nor labor in his own strength. 

I know your hearts, and that the truth of them never 
fails when an hour of trial comes which you recognize for 
such. But you know not when the hour of trial first finds 
you, nor when it verily finds you. You imagine that you 
are only called upon to wait and to suffer ; to surrender 
and to mourn. You know that you must not weaken the 
hearts of your husbands and lovers, even by the one fear 
of which those hearts are capable, — the fear of parting 
from you, or of causing you grief. Through weary years 
of separation ; through fearful expectancies of unknown 
fate ; through the tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which 
might so easily have been joy, and the tenfold yearning 
for glorious life struck down in its prime — through all 

1 Hierarchy : here, a graded rank or order. 



no JOHN RUSKIN. 

these agonies you fail not, and never will fail. But your 
trial is not in these. To be heroic in danger is little ; — 
you are Englishwomen. To be heroic in change and sway 
of fortune is little ; — for do you not love ? To be patient 
through the great chasm and pause of loss is little ; — for 
do you not still love in heaven ? But to be heroic in hap- 
piness ; to bear yourselves gravely and righteously in the 
dazzling of the sunshine of morning ; not to forget the 
God in whom you trust, when He gives you most ; not to 
fail those who trust you, when they seem to need you 
least ; this is the difficult fortitude. It is not in the pin- 
ing of absence, not in the peril of battle, not in the wast- 
ing of sickness, that your prayer should be most passion- 
ate, or your guardianship most tender. Pray, mothers and 
maidens, for your young soldiers in the bloom of their 
pride; pray for them, while the only dangers round them 
are in their own wayward wills ; watch you, and pray, when 
they have to face, not death, but temptation. But it is 
this fortitude also for which there is the crowning reward. 
Believe me, the whole course and character of your lovers' 
lives is in your hands ; what you would have them be, they 
shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but de- 
serve to have them so ; for they are but mirrors in which 
you will see yourselves imaged. If you are frivolous, they 
will be so also ; if you have no understanding of the scope 
of their duty, they also will forget it ; they will listen, — 
they can listen, — to no other interpretation of it than that 
uttered from your lips. Bid them to be brave ; — they 
will be brave for you ; bid them to be cowards ; and how 
noble soever they be ; — they will quail for you. Bid them 
be wise, and they will be wise for you; mock at their 



IVAJ?. 1 1 1 

counsel, they will be fools for you : such and so absolute 
is your rule over them. You fancy, perhaps, as you have 
been told so often, that a wife's rule should only be over 
her husband's house, not over his mind. Ah, no ! the true 
rule is just the reverse of that ; a true wife, in her hus- 
band's house, is his servant ; it is in his heart that she is 
queen. Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is her 
part to be ; whatever of highest he can hope, it is hers to 
promise ; all that is dark in him she must purge into 
purity ; all that is failing in him she must strengthen into 
truth ; from her, through all the world's clamor, he must 
win his praise ; in her, through all the world's warfare, he 
must find his peace. 

And, now, but one word more. You may wonder, per- 
haps, that I have spoken all this night in praise of war. 
Yet, truly, if it might be, I, for one, would fain join in the 
cadence of hammer-strokes that should beat swords into 
ploughshares : and that this cannot be, is not the fault of 
us men. It *is j/^//r fault. Wholly yours. Only by your 
command, or by your permission, can any contest take 
place among us. And the real, final, reason for all the 
poverty, misery, and rage of battle, throughout Europe, is 
simply that you women, however good, however religious, 
however self-sacrificing for those whom you love, are too 
selfish and too thoughtless to take pains for any creature 
out of your own immediate circles. You fancy that you 
are sorry for the pain of others. Now I just tell you this, 
that if the usual course of war, instead of unroofing peas- 
ants' houses and ravaging peasants' fields, merely broke 
the china upon your own drawing-room tables, no war in 
civilized countries would last a week. I tell you more. 



112 JOHN RUSKIN. 

that at whatever moment you choose to put a period to 
war, you could do it with less trouble than you take any 
day to go out to dinner. You know, or at least you 
might know if you would think, that every battle you 
hear of has made many widows and orphans. We have, 
none of us, heart enough truly to mourn with these. But 
at least we might put on the outer symbols of mourning 
with them. Let but every Christian lady who has con- 
science toward God, vow that she will mourn, at least out- 
wardly, for His killed creatures. Your praying is useless, 
and your churchgoing mere mockery of God, if you have 
not plain obedience in you enough for this. Let every 
lady in the upper classes of civilized Europe simply vow 
that, while any cruel war proceeds, she will wear black ; — 
a mute's 1 black, — with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse 
for, or evasion into, prettiness. I tell you again, no war 
would last a week. 

And lastly. You women of England are all now shriek- 
ing with one voice, — you and your clergymen together, 
— because you hear of your Bibles being attacked. If 
you choose to obey your Bibles, you will never care who 
attacks them, It is just because you never fulfil a single 
downright precept of the Book, that you are so careful for 
its credit : and just because you don't care to obey its 
whole words, that you are so particular about the letters of 
them. The Bible tells you to dress plainly, — and you are 
mad for finery ; the Bible tells you to have pity on the 
poor, — and you crush them under your carriage-wheels ; 
the Bible tells you to do judgment and justice, — and you 

1 Mute : here, a person hired by an undertaker to stand at the door of a 
house in which there is a corpse. 



IVA/^. 



113 



do not know, nor care to know, so much as what the Bible 
word 'justice' means. Do but learn so much of God's 
truth as that comes to ; know what He means when He 
tells you to be just : and teach your sons, that their brav- 
ery is but a fool's boast, and their deeds but a firebrand's 
tossing, unless they are indeed Just men, and Perfect in 
the Fear of God ; and you will soon have no more war, 
unless it be indeed such as is willed by Him, of whom, 
though Prince of Peace, it is also written, * In Righteous- 
ness He doth judge, and make war.' ^ 

1 Rev, xix. 2. 



WORK.* 



MY FRIENDS, — I have not come among you to- 
night to endeavor to give you an entertaining 
lecture ; but to tell you a few plain facts, and ask you 
some plain, but necessary questions. I have seen and 
known too much of the struggle for life among our labor- 
ing population, to feel at ease, even under any circum- 
stances, in inviting them to dwell on the trivialities of my 
own studies ;* but, much more, as I meet to-night, for the 
first time, the members of a working Institute established 
in the district in which I have passed the greater part of 
my life,^ I am desirous that we should at once understand 
each other, on graver matters. I would fain tell you, with 
what feelings, and with what hope, I regard this Insti- 
tution, as one of many such, now happily established 
throughout England, as well as in other countries ; — In- 
stitutions which are preparing the way for a great change 
in all the circumstances of industrial life ; but of which 
the success must wholly depend upon our clearly under- 
standing the circumstances and necessary limits of this 
change. No teacher can truly promote the cause of edu- 
cation, until he knows the conditions of the life for which 

* A Lecture delivered before the Working Men's Institute, at Cambervvell. 
See "The Crown of Wild Olive." 

^ Camberwell is a district in southern London. It includes the suburb 
ivhere Ruskin spent much of his childhood and where he afterward lived. 



WORK. 1 1 5 

that education is to prepare his pupil. And the fact that 
he is called upon to address you, nominally, as a ' Working 
Class,' must compel him, if he is in any wise earnest or 
thoughtful, to inquire in the outset, on what you your- 
selves suppose this class distinction has been founded in 
the past, and must be founded in the future. The manner 
of the amusement, and the matter of the teaching, which 
any of us can offer you, must depend wholly on our first 
understanding from you, whether you think the distinction 
heretofore drawn between working men and others, is 
truly or falsely founded. Do you accept it as it stands } 
do you wish it to be modified t or do you think the object 
of education is to efface it, and make us forget it for ever } 
Let me make myself more distinctly understood. We 
call this — you and I — a 'Working Men's' Institute, and 
our- college in London, a 'Working Men's' College. Now, 
how do you consider that these several institutes differ, or 
ought to differ, from 'idle men's' institutes and 'idle 
men's ' colleges } Or by what other word than ' idle ' shall 
I distinguish those whom the happiest and wisest of work- 
ing men do not object to call the ' Upper Classes' t Are 
there really upper classes, — are there lower 1 How much 
should they always be elevated, how much always de- 
pressed .-* And, gentlemen and ladies — I pray those of 
you who are here to forgive me the offence there may be 
in what I am going to say. It is not / who wish to say it. 
Bitter voices say it ; voices of battle and of famine through 
all the world, which must be heard some day, whoever 
keeps silence. Neither is it to you specially that I say it. 
I am sure that most now present know their duties of 
kindness, and fulfil them, better perhaps than I do mine. 
But I speak to you as representing your whole class, which 



Il6 JOHN RUSKIN. 

errs, I know, chiefly by thoughtlessness, but not therefore 
the less terribly. Wilful error is limited by the will, but 
what limit is there to that of which we are unconscious ? 

Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to these workmen, 
and ask them, also as representing a great multitude, what 
they think the 'upper classes' are, and ought to be, in 
relation to them. Answer, you workmen who are here, as 
you would among yourselves, frankly; and tell me how 
you would have me call those classes. Am I to call them 
— would yoii think me right in calling them — the idle 
classes } \ think you would feel somewhat uneasy, and as 
if I were not treating my subject honestly, or speaking 
from my heart, if I went on under the supposition that all 
rich people were idle. You would be both unjust and un- 
wise if you allowed me to say that; not less unjust than 
the rich people who say that all the poor are idle, and will 
never work if they can help it, or more than they can help. 

For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle 
rich ; and there are busy poor and busy rich. Many a 
beggar is as lazy as if he had ten thousand a year ; and 
many a man of large fortune is busier than his errand-boy, 
and never would think of stopping in the street to play 
marbles. So that, in a large view, the distinction between 
workers and idlers, as between knaves and honest men, 
runs through the very heart and innermost economies of 
men of all ranks and in all positions. There is a working 
class — strong and happy — among both rich and poor; 
there is an idle class — weak, wicked, and miserable — 
among both rich and poor. And the worst of the mis- 
understandings arising between the two orders come of 
the unlucky fact that the wise of one class habitually con- 
template the fooUsh of the other. If the busy rich people 



WORK. 1 1 7 

watched and rebuked the idle rich people, all would be 
right ; and if the busy poor people watched and rebuked 
the idle poor people, all would be right. But each class 
has a tendency to look for the faults of the other. A 
hard-working man of property is particularly offended by 
an idle beggar ; and an orderly, but poor, workman is 
naturally intolerant of the licentious luxury of the rich. 
And what is severe judgment in the minds of the just men 
of either class, becomes fierce enmity in the unjust — but 
among the unjust only. None but the dissolute among 
the poor look upon the rich as their natural enemies, or 
desire to pillage their houses and divide their property. 
None but the dissolute among the rich speak in opprobrious 
terms of the vices and follies of the poor. 

There is, then, no class distinction between idle and in- 
dustrious people ; and I am going to-night to speak only of 
the industrious. The idle people we will put out of our 
thoughts at once — they are mere nuisances — what ought 
to be done with them, we'll talk of at another time. But 
there are class distinctions among the industrious them- 
selves; — tremendous distinctions, which rise and fall to 
every degree in the infinite thermometer of human pain 
and of human power — distinctions of high and low, of lost 
and won, to the whole reach of man's soul and body. 

These separations we will study, and the laws of them, 
among energetic men only, who, whether they work or 
whether they play, put their strength into the work, and 
their strength into the game ; being, in the full sense of 
the word, 'industrious,' one way or another — with a pur- 
pose, or without. And these distinctions are mainly four : 

I. Between those who work, and those who play. 

II. Between those who produce the means of life, and 
those who consume them. 



Il8 JOHN RUSKIN. 

III. Between those who work with the head, and those 
who work with the hand. 

IV. Between those who work wisely, and who work fool- 
ishly. 

For easier memory, let us say we are going to oppose, 
in our examination, — 

I. Work to play ; 

II. Production to consumption ; 

III. Head to hand ; and, 

IV. Sense to nonsense. 

I. First, then, of the distinction between the classes 
who work and the classes who play. Of course we must 
agree upon a definition of these terms, — work and play, 
— before going farther. Now, roughly, not with vain 
subtlety of definition, but for plain use of the words, 'play' 
is an exertion of body or mind, made to please ourselves, 
and with no determined end ; and work is a thing done 
because it ought to be done, and with a determined end. 
You play, as you call it, at cricket, for instance. That is 
as hard work as anything else ; but it amuses you, and it 
has no result but the amusement. If it were done as an 
ordered form of exercise, for health's sake, it would be- 
come work directly. So, in like manner, whatever we do 
to please ourselves, and only for the sake of the pleasure, 
not for an ultimate object, is 'play,' the 'pleasing thing,' 
not the useful thing. Play may be useful in a secondary 
sense (nothing is indeed more useful or necessary) ; but 
the use of it depends on its being spontaneous. 

Let us, then, inquire together what sort of games the 
playing class in England spend their lives in playing at. 

The first of all English games is making money. That 



WORK. 1 19 

is an all-absorbing game ; and we knock each other down 
oftener in playing at that than at foot-ball, or any other 
roughest sport ; and it is absolutely without purpose ; no 
one who engages heartily in that game ever knows why. 
Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his 
money — he never knows. He doesn't make it to do any- 
thing with it. He gets it only that he may get it. * What 
will you make of what you have got } ' you ask. * Well, I'll 
get more,' he says. Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. 
There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than 
other people is the game. And there's no use in the money, 
but to have more of it than other people is the game. 

Well, this is the first great English game. It differs 
from the rest in that it appears always to be producing 
money, while the other game is expensive. But it does 
not always produce money. There's a great difference 
between ^ winning ' money and * making ' it ; a great differ- 
ence between getting it out of another man's pocket into 
ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by no means 
the same thing as making it ; the tax-gatherer's house is 
not the Mint ; and much of the apparent gain (so called), 
in commerce, is only a form of taxation on carriage or 
exchange. 

Our next great English game, however, hunting and 
shooting, is costly altogether ; and how much we are fined 
for it annually in land, horses, gamekeepers and game laws, 
and all else that accompanies that beautiful and special 
English game, I will not endeavor to count now : but note 
only that, except for exercise, this is not merely a useless 
game, but a deadly one, to all connected with it. For 
through horse-racing, you get every form of what the higher 
classes everywhere call * Play,' in distinction from all other 



I20 JOHN RUSK IN. 

plays; that is — gambling; by no means a beneficial or 
recreative game : and, through game-preserving,^ you get 
also some curious laying out of ground ; that beautiful ar- 
rangement of dwelling-house for man and beast, by which 
we have grouse and blackcock — so many brace to the acre, 
and men and women — so many brace to the garret. I 
often wonder what the angelic builders and surveyors — • 
the angelic builders who build the * many mansions ' up 
above there ; and the angelic surveyors, who measured that 
four-square city with their measuring reeds ^ — I wonder 
what they think, or are supposed to think, of the laying 
out of ground by this nation, which has set itself, as it 
seems, literally to accomplish, word for word, or rather fact 
for word, in the persons of those poor whom its Master left 
to represent him, what that Master said of himself — that 
foxes and birds had homes, but He none. 

Then, next to the gentlemen's game of hunting, we must 
put the ladies' game of dressing. It is not the cheapest of 
games. I saw a brooch at a jeweller's in Bond Street^ a 
fortnight ago, not an inch wide, and without any singular 
jewel in it, yet worth 3000/.^ And I wish I could tell you 
what this * play ' costs, altogether, in England, France, and 
Russia annually. But it is a pretty game, and on certain 
terms, I like it ; nay, I don't see it played quite as much 
as I would fain have it. You ladies like to lead the fashion : 
— by all means lead it — lead it thoroughly, lead it far 

1 Game-preserving : a large extent of land in England is held by the 
great land-owners for hunting purposes, and is stocked with game under the 
care of keepers. 

2 Revelation xxi. 15. 

^ Bond Street : a fashionable shopping street at the West End of London. 
* 3000/: three thousand pounds, or ;^i 5,000. 



WORK, 121 

enough. Dress yourselves nicely, and dress everybody else 
nicely. Lead the fashions for the poor first ; make tJieni 
look well, and you yourselves will look, in ways of which 
you have now no conception, all the better. The fashions 
you have set for some time among your peasantry are not 
pretty ones ; their doublets ^ are too irregularly slashed, 
and the wind blows too frankly through them. 

Then there are other games, wild enough, as I could 
show you if I had time. 

There's playing at literature, and playing at art — very 
different, both, from working at literature, or working at 
art, but I've no time to speak of these. I pass to the 
greatest of all — the play of plays, the great gentlemen's 
game, which ladies like them best to play at, — the game 
of War. It is entrancingl)^ pleasant to the imagination ; 
the facts of it, not always so pleasant. We dress for it, 
however, more finely than for any other sport ; and go out 
to it, not merely in scarlet, as to hunt, but in scarlet and 
gold and all manner of fine colors : of course we could 
fight better in gray, and without feathers ; but all nations 
have agreed that it is good to be well dressed at this play. 
Then the bats and balls are very costly ; our English and 
French bats, with the balls and wickets, even those which 
we don't make any use of, costing, I suppose, now about 
fifteen millions ^ of money annually to each nation ; all of 
which you know is paid for by hard laborer's work in the 
furrow and furnace. A costly game ! — not to speak of its 

1 Doublets: jacket-like garments once worn in England. They were 
frequently made of rich stuffs, and slashed on the sleeves to show the colored 
silk lining. Here, of course, the slashing alluded to is that of rags and 
tatters. 

- Fifteen millions (of pounds) : $75,000,000. 



122 JOHN RUSK IN. 

consequences ; I will say at present nothing of these. The 
mere immediate cost of all these plays is what I want you 
to consider ; they all cost deadly work somewhere, as many 
of us know too well. The jewel-cutter, whose sight fails 
over the diamonds ; the weaver, whose arm fails over the 
web ; the iron-forger, whose breath fails before the furnace 
— tJiey know what work is — • they, who have all the work, 
and none of the play, except a kind they have named for 
themselves down in the black north country,^ where ' play ' 
means being laid up by sickness. It is a pretty example 
for philologists,^ of varying dialect, this change in the sense 
of the word 'play,' as used in the black country of Birming- 
ham, and the red and black country of Baden Baden.^ Yes, 
gentlemen, and gentlewomen, of England, who think 'one 
moment unamused a misery, not made for feeble man,' this 
is what you have brought the word ' play ' to mean, in the 
heart of merry England ! You may have your fluting and 
piping ; * but there are sad children sitting in the market- 
place, who indeed cannot say to you, ' We have piped unto 
you, and ye have not danced : ' but eternally shall say to you, 
*We have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.' ^ 
II. Next, notice that there is a distinction between rich 
and poor which rests on two bases. Within its proper 

1 Black north country : the iron manufacturing district in central Eng- 
land, of which Birmingham is the chief town. It gets its name from the coal 
smoke which fills the air, and begrimes the surface of the soil and the buildings. 

'^ Philologists : those who are versed in the study of language. 

3 Baden Baden (Bah'den Bah'den) : a town of Germany, once famous 
for its licensed gambling-houses. A favorite game of cards there, called Rouge 
et Noir (Red and Black), was played on tables m?rked with red and black 
spots. 

* Piping : playing on a pipe or fife. 

5 Matthew xi. 17. 



WORK. 123 

limits, on a basis which is lawful and everlastingly neces- 
sary ; beyond them, on a basis unlawful, and everlastingly 
corrupting the frame-work of society. The law basis of 
wealth is, that a man who works should be paid the fair 
value of his work ; and that if he does not choose to spend 
it to-day, he should have free leave to keep it, and spend it 
to-morrow. Thus, an industrious man working daily, and 
laying by daily, attains at last the possession of an accumu- 
lated sum of wealth, to which he has absolute right. The 
idle person who will not work, and the wasteful person who 
lays nothing by, at the end of the same time will be doubly 
poor — poor in possession, and dissolute in moral habit ; 
and he will then naturally covet the money which the other 
has saved. And if he is then allowed to attack the other, 
and rob him of his well-earned wealth, there is no more 
any motive for saving, or any reward for good conduct ; 
and all society is thereupon dissolved, or exists only in sys- 
tems of rapine. Therefore the first necessity of social life 
is the clearness of national conscience in enforcing the law 
— that he should keep who has justly earned. 

That law, I say, is the proper basis of distinction between 
rich and poor. But there is also a false basis of distinc- 
tion ; namely, the power held over those who earn wealth 
by those who levy or exact it. There will be always a num- 
ber of men who would fain set themselves to the accumu- 
lation of wealth as the sole object of their lives. Neces- 
sarily, that class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in 
intellect, and more or less cowardly. It is physically im- 
possible for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to 
make money the chief object of his thoughts ; as physically 
impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the principal 
object of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but 



124 JOHN RUSK IN. 

their dinner is not the main object of their hves. So all 
healthily minded people like making money — ought to like 
it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it ; but the main 
object of their life is not money ; it is something better 
than money. A good soldier, for instance, mainly wishes 
to do his fighting well. He is glad of his pay — very 
properly so, and justly grumbles when you keep him ten 
years without it ■ — still, his main notion of life is to win 
battles, not to be paid for winning them. So of clergymen. 
They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, of course ; but 
yet, if they are brave and well educated, the pew-rent is 
not the sole object of their lives, and the baptismal fee is 
not the sole purpose of the baptism ; the clergyman's object 
is essentially to baptize and preach, not to be paid for preach- 
ing. So of doctors. They like fees no doubt, — ought to 
like them ; yet if they are brave and well educated, the en- 
tire object of their lives is not fees. They, on the whole, 
desire to cure the sick ; and, — if they are good doctors, 
and the choice were fairly put to them, — would rather 
cure their patient, and lose their fee, than kill him, and get 
it. And so with all other brave and rightly trained men ; 
their work is first, their fee second — very important always, 
but still second. But in every nation, as I said, there are a 
vast class who are ill-educated, cowardly, and more or less 
stupid. And with these people, just as certainly the fee is 
first, and the work second, as with brave people the work 
is first and the fee second. And this is no small distinc- 
tion. It is the whole distinction in a man ; distinction 
between life and death in him, between heaven and hell/>r 
him. You cannot serve two masters ; — you iniLst serve one 
or other. If your work is first with you, and your fee sec- 
ond, work is your master, and the lord of work, who is God. 



WOIiK. 125 

But if your fee is first with you, and your work second, fee 
is your master, and the lord of fee, who is the Devil ; and 
not only the Devil, but the lowest of devils — the 'least 
erected fiend that fell.'^ So there you have it in brief terms ; 
Work first — you are God's servants; Fee first — you are 
the Fiend's. And it makes a difference, now and ever, be- 
lieve me, whether you serve Him who has on His vesture 
and thigh v/ritten, ' King of Kings,' ^ and whose service is 
perfect freedom ; or him on whose vesture and thigh the 
name is written, ' Slave of Slaves,' and whose service is 
perfect slavery. 

However, in every nation there are, and must always be 
a certain number of these Fiend's servants', who have it 
principally for the object of their lives to make money. 
They are always, as I said, more or less stupid, and can 
not conceive of anything else so nice as money. Stupidity 
is always the basis of the Judas bargain. We do great 
injustice to Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all com- 
mon wickedness. He was only a common money-lover, 
and, like all money-lovers, didn't understand Christ ; — 
couldn't make out the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. 
He didn't want Him to be killed. He was horror-struck 
when he found that Christ would be killed ; threw his 
money away instantly, and hanged himself. How many of 
our present money-seekers, think you, would have the grace 

1 ** Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell 

From heaven; for e'en in heaven his looks and thoughts 

Were always dovvrfcvard bent, admiring more 

The riches of heaven's pavement, trodden gold, 

Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed 

In vision beatific." — Milton's Paradise Lost, Book I. Line 679. 

2 Revelation xix. 16. 



126 JOHN RUSK IN. 

to hang themselves, whoever was killed ? But Judas was 
a common, selfish, muddle-headed, pilfering fellow ; his 
hand always in the bag ^ of the poor, not caring for them. 
He didn't understand Christ ; yet believed in Him, much 
more than most of us do ; had seen Him do miracles, 
thought He was quite strong enough to shift for Himself, 
and he, Judas, might as well make his own little bye-per- 
quisites ^ out of the affair. Christ would come out of it 
well enough, and he have his thirty pieces. Now, that is 
the money-seeker's idea, all over the world. He doesn't 
hate Christ, but can't understand Him — doesn't care for 
Him — sees no good in that benevolent business ; makes 
his own little job out of it at all events, come what will. 
And thus, out of every mass of men, you have a certain 
number of bag-men — your ' fee-first ' men, whose main 
object is to make money. And they do make it — make it 
in all sorts of unfair ways, chiefly by the weight and force 
of money itself, or what is called the power of capital ; that 
is to say, the power which money, once obtained, has over 
the labor of the poor, so that the capitalist can take all its 
produce to himself, except the laborer's food. That is the 
modern Judas's way of 'carrying the bag,' and 'bearing 
what is put therein.' 

Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair advantage.^ 
Has not the man who has worked for the money a right to 
use it as he best can } No ; in this respect, money is now 
exactly what mountain promontories over public roads were 

1 The bag : the purse or money-box. " This he [Judas Iscariot] said, not 
that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and 
bare what was put therein." — John xii. 6, and compare xiii. 29. 

^ Bye-perquisites : something gained in an irregular way over and above 
one's fixed wages. 



WORK. 127 

in old times. The barons fought for them fairly: — the 
strongest and cunningest got them ; then fortified then\ 
and made everyone who passed below pay toll. Well, 
capital now is exactly what crags were then. Men fight 
fairly (we will, at least, grant so much, though it is more 
than we ought) for their money; but, once having got it, 
the fortified millionaire can make everybody who passes 
below pay toll to his million, and build another tower of his 
money castle. And I can tell you, the poor vagrants by 
the roadside suffer now quite as much from the bag-baron, 
as ever they did from the crag-baron. Bags and crags 
have just the same result on rags. I have not time, how- 
ever, to-night to show you in how many ways the power of 
capital is unjust; but this one great principle I have to 
assert — you will find it quite indisputably true that when- 
ever money is the principal object of life with either man 
or nation, it is both got ill, and spent ill ; and does harm 
both in the getting and spending ; but when it is not the 
principal object, it and all other things will be well got, 
and well spent. And here is the test, with every man, of 
whether money is the principal object with him, or not. 
If in mid-life he could pause and say, ** Now I have enough 
to live upon, I'll live upon it; and having well earned it, I 
will also well spend it, and go out of the world poor, as I 
came into it," then money is not principal with him ; but if, 
having enough to live upon in the manner befitting his 
character and rank, he still wants to make more, and to 
die rich, then money is the principal object with him, and it 
becomes a curse to himself, and generally to those who 
spend it after him. For you know it vii/st be spent some 
day ; the only question is whether the man who makes it 
shall spend it, or some one else. And generally it is better 



128 JOHN RUSK IN. 

for the maker to spend it, for he will know best its value 
and use. This is the true law of life. And if a man does 
not choose thus to spend his money, he must either hoard 
it or lend it, and the worst thing he can generally do is to 
lend it : for borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and 
it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done, and all 
unjust war protracted. 

For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to 
foreign military governments, and how strange it is. If 
your little boy came to you to ask for money to spend in 
squibs and crackers, you would think twice before you 
gave it him and you would have some idea that it was 
wasted, when you saw it fly off in fireworks, even though 
he did no mischief with it. But the Russian children, and 
Austrian children, come to you, borrowing money, not to 
spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges and bayonets 
to attack you in India with, and to keep down all noble life 
in Italy with, and to murder Polish women and children 
with ; and that you will give at once, because they pay you 
interest for it. Now, in order to pay you that interest, 
they must tax every working peasant in their dominions; 
and on that work you live. You therefore at once rob 
the Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish the Polish 
peasant, and you live on the produce of the theft, and the 
bribe for the assassination ! That is the broad fact — that 
is the practical meaning of your foreign loans, and of 
most large interest of money ; and then you quarrel with 
Bishop Colenso^ forsooth, as if lie denied the Bible, and 
you believed it ! though wretches as you are, every deliber- 

1 Bishop Colenso: an English bishop of South Africa (1854), who pub- 
lished several works denying the inspiration and historical accuracy of certain 
parts of the Old Testament. 



WORK. 



29 



ate act of your lives is a new defiance of its primary orders ; 
and as if, for most of the rich men of England at this 
moment, it were not indeed to be desired, as the best 
thing at least for them, that the Bible should not be true, 
since against them these words are written in it : 'The 
rust of your gold and silver shall be a witness against you, 
and shall eat your flesh, as it were fire.'^ 

III. I pass now to our third condition of separation, 
between the men who work with the hand, and those 
who work with the head. 

And here we have at last an inevitable distinction. 
There miLst be work done by the arms, or none of us could 
live. There vuist ~be work done by the brains, or the life 
we get would not be worth having. And the same men 
cannot do both. There is rough work to be done, and 
rough men must do it ; there is gentle work to be done, 
and gentlemen must do it ; and it is physically impossible 
that one class should do, or divide, the work of the other. 
And it is of no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by 
fine words, and to talk to the workman about the honor- 
ableness of manual labor, and the dignity of humanity. 
That is a grand old proverb of Sancho Panza's,^ * Fine 
words butter no parsnips ; ' and I can tell you that, all over 
England just now, you workmen are buying a great deal 
too much butter at that dairy. Rough work, honorable or 
not, takes the life out of us ; and the man who has been 
heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an express 
train against the north wind all night, or holding a collier's ^ 

^ James v. 3. 

2 Sancho Panza (San'ko Pan'za): a humorous character in Cervantes 
famous Spanish novel " Don Quixote." 

3 Collier : here, a vessel engaged in the coal trade. 



I30 JOHN RUSK IN. 

helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling white hot iron 
at a furnace mouth, that man is not the same at the end of 
his day, or night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet 
room, with everything comfortable about him, reading 
books, or classing butterflies, or painting pictures. If it is 
any comfort to you to be told that the rough work is the 
more honorable of the two, I should be sorry to take that 
much of consolation from you ; and in some sense I need 
not. The rough work is at all events real, honest, and, 
generally, though not always, useful ; while the fine work 
is, a great deal of it, foolish and false as well as fine, and 
therefore dishonorable : but when both kinds are equally 
well and worthily done, the head's is the noble work, and 
the hand's the ignoble ; and of all hand work whatsoever, 
necessary for the maintenance of life, those old words, 'In 
the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread,' ^ indicate that 
the inherent nature of it is one of calamity ; and that the 
ground, cursed for our sake, casts also some shadow of 
degradation into our contest with its thorn and its thistle ; 
so that all nations have held their days honorable, or 
*holy,' and constituted them 'holydays' or 'holidays,' by 
making them days of rest ; and the promise, which, among 
all our distant hopes, seems to cast the chief brightness 
over death, is that blessing of the, dead who die in the 
Lord, that 'they rest from their labors, and their works do 
follow them.' ^ 

And thus the perpetual question and contest must arise, 
who is to do this rough work t and how is the worker of it 
to be comforted, redeemed, and rewarded .? and what kind 
of play should he have, and what rest, in this world, some- 
times, as well as in the next t Well, my good working 

1 Genesis iii. 19. » ^ Revelation xiv. 13. 



WORIC. 131 

friends, these questions will take a little time to answer 
yet. They must be answered : all good men are occupied 
with them, and all honest thinkers. There's grand head 
work doing about them ; but much must be discovered, 
and much attempted in vain, before anything decisive can 
be told you. Only note these few particulars, which are 
already sure. 

As to the distribution of the hard work. None of us, or 
very few of us, do either hard or soft work because we 
think we ought ; but because we have chanced to fall into 
the way of it, and cannot help ourselves. Now, nobody 
does anything well that he cannot help doing : work is only 
done well when it is done with a will ; and no man has a 
thoroughly sound will unless he knows he is doing what he 
should, and is in his place. And, depend upon it, all work 
must be done at last, not in a disorderly, scrambling, dog- 
gish way, but in an ordered, soldierly, human way — a 
lawful way. Men are enlisted for the labor that kills — the 
labor of war : they are counted, trained, fed, dressed, and 
praised for that. Let them be enlisted also for the labor 
that feeds : let them be counted, trained, fed, dressed, 
praised for that. Teach the plough exercise as carefully as 
you do the sword exercise, and let the officers of troops of 
life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of troops of 
death; and all is done: but neither this, nor any other 
right thing, can be accomplished — you can't even see your 
way to it — unless, first of all, both servant and master are 
resolved that, come what will of it, they will do each other 
justice. People are perpetually squabbling about what will 
be best to do, or easiest to do, or advisablest to do, or 
profitablest to do ; but they never, so far as I hear them 
talk, ever ask what it is just to do. And it is the law of 



132 JOHN RUSK IN. 

heaven that you shall not be able to judge what is wise or 
easy, unless you are first resolved to judge what is just, 
and to do it. That is the one thing constantly reiterated 
by our Master — the order of all others that is given 
oftenest — 'Do justice and judgment.'^ That's your Bible 
order; that's the 'Service of God,' not praying nor psalm- 
singing. You are told, indeed, to sing psalms when you 
are merry, and to pray when you need anything ; and, by 
the perversion of the Evil Spirit, we get to think that 
praying and psalm-singing are 'service.' If a child finds 
itself in want of anything, it runs in and asks its father for 
it — does it call that, doing its father a service.? If it begs 
for a toy or a piece of cake — does it call that serving its 
father t That, with God, is prayer, and He hkes to hear 
it ; He likes you to ask Him for cake when you want it ; 
but He doesn't call that 'serving Him.' Begging is not 
serving: God likes mere beggars as little as you do — He 
likes honest servants, not beggars. So when a child loves 
its father very much, and is very happy, it may sing little 
songs about him ; but it doesn't call that serving its 
father ; neither is singing songs about God, serving God. 
It is enjoying ourselves, if it's anything ; most probably it 
is nothing ; but if it's anything, it is serving ourselves, not 
God. And yet we are impudent enough to call our beg- 
gings and chantings 'Divine Service:' we say 'Divine 
service will be "performed"' (that's our word — the form 
of it gone through) 'at eleven o'clock.' Alas! — unless we 
perform Divine service in every willing act of our life, 
we never perform it at all. The one Divine work — the 
one ordered sacrifice — is to do justice; and it is the last 
we are ever inclined to do. Anything rather than that! 

1 Genesis xviii. 19, and compare Matthew xxiii. 23, and Luke xi. 42. 



WORK. 133 

As much charity as you choose, but no justice. 'Nay,' you 
will say, 'charity is greater than justice.' Yes, it is greater ; 
it is the summit of justice — it is the temple of which 
justice is the foundation. But you can't have the top 
without the bottom ; you cannot build upon charity. You 
must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you 
have not, at first, charity to build with. It is the last 
reward of good work. Do justice to your brother (you can 
do that, whether you love him or not), and you will come 
to love him. But do injustice to him, because you don't 
love him ; and you will come to hate him. It is all very 
fine to think you can build upon charity to begin with ; but 
you will find all you have got to begin with, begins at 
home, and is essentially love of yourself. You well-to-do 
people, for instance, who are here to-night, will go to 
'Divine service' next Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your 
little children will have their tight little Sunday boots on, 
and lovely little Sunday feathers in their hats ; and you'll 
think, complacently and piously, how lovely they look! 
So they do ; and you love them heartily, and you like stick- 
ing feathers in their hats. That's all right : that is chari- 
ty: but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will 
come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up also, — it, 
in its Sunday dress, — the dirtiest rags it has, — that it 
may beg the better : we shall give it a penny, and think 
how good we are. That's charity going abroad. But what 
does Justice say, walking and watching near us "^ Chris- 
tian Justice has been strangely mute, and seemingly blind ; 
and, if not blind, decrepit, this many a day : she keeps her 
accounts still, however — quite steadily — doing them at 
nights, carefully, with her bandage off, and through acutest 
spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she cares 



134 JOHN RUSK IN. 

about). You must put your ear down ever so close to her 
lips to hear her speak ; and then you will start at what she 
first whispers, for it will certainly be, ' Why shouldn't that 
little crossing-sweeper have a feather on its head, as well 
as your own child ? ' Then you may ask Justice, in an 
amazed manner, ' How she can possibly be so foolish as to 
think children could sweep crossings with feathers on their 
heads ?' Then you stoop again, and Justice says — still in 
her dull, stupid way — 'Then, why don't you, every other 
Sunday, leave your child to sweep the crossing, and take 
the little sweeper to church in a hat and feather ? ' Mercy 
on us (you think), what will she say next ? And you 
answer, of course, that 'you don't, because every body 
ought to remain content in the position in which Provi- 
dence has placed him.' Ah, my friends, that's the gist of 
the whole question. Did Providence put him in that 
position, or did yoii ? You knock a man into a ditch, and 
then you tell him to remain content in the 'position in 
which Providence has placed him.' That's modern Chris- 
tianity. You say — ' We did not knock him into the ditch.' 
How do you know what you have done, or are doing? 
That's just what we have all got to know, and what we 
shall never know, until the question with us every morn- 
ing, is, not how to do the gainful thing, but how to do the 
just thing, nor until we are at least so far on the way to 
being Christian, as to have understood that maxim of the 
poor half-way Mahometan, ' One hour in the execution of 
justice is worth seventy years of prayer.' 

Supposing, then, we have it determined with appropriate 
justice, zvho is to do the hand-work, the next questions 
must be how the hand-workers are to be paid, and how 
they are to be refreshed, and what play they are to have. 



WOJiK. 135 

Now, the possible quantity of play depends on the possible 
quantity of pay ; and the quantity of pay is not a matter 
for consideration to hand-workers only, but to all workers. 
Generally, good, useful work, whether of the hand or head, 
is either ill-paid, or not paid at all. I don't say it should 
be so, but it always is so. People, as a rule, only pay for 
being amused or being cheated, not for being served. 
Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day 
to your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of 
the best head work in art, literature, or science, is ever 
paid for. How much do you think Homer got for his 
Iliad ? or Dante for his Paradise > only bitter bread and 
salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In 
science, the man who discovered the telescope, and first 
saw heaven, was paid with a dungeon ; the man who 
invented the microscope, and first saw earth, died of star- 
vation, driven from his home ; it is indeed very clear 
that God means all thoroughly good work and talk to be 
done for nothing. Baruch, the scribe, did not get a penny 
a line for writing Jeremiah's second roll ^ for him, I 
fancy ; and St. Stephen did not get bishop's pay for that 
long sermon of his to the Pharisees ; ^ nothing but stones. 
For indeed that is the world-father's ^ proper payment. 
So surely as any of the world's children work for the 
world's good, honestly, with head and heart ; and come to 
it, saying, *Give us a little bread, just to keep the life in 
us,' the world-father answers them, ' No, my children, not 
bread ; a stone, if you like, or as many as you need, to 

1 Roll : the books of the Old Testament were originally written on long 
rolls of parchment. See Jeremiah xxxvi. 4. 

2 See Acts vii. 58. 

^ World-father : here, in the sense of Satan or the spirit of worldliness. 



136 JOHN RUSK IN. 

keep you quiet.' But the hand-workers are not so ill off as 
all this comes to. The worst that can happen \.o you is to 
break stones ; ^ not to be broken by them. And for you 
there will come a time for better payment ; we shall pay 
people not quite so much for talking in Parliament and 
doing nothing, as for holding their tongues out of it and 
doing something ; we shall pay our ploughman a little more 
and our lawyer a little less, and so on : but, at least, we may 
even now take care that whatever work is done shall be 
fully paid for : and the man who does it paid for it, not 
somebody else; and that it shall be done in an orderly, 
soldierly, well-guided, wholesome way, under good captains 
and lieutenants of labor ; and that it shall have its appoint- 
ed times of rest, and enough of them ; and that in those 
times the play shall be wholesome play, not in- theatrical 
gardens, with tin flowers and gas sunshine, and girls danc- 
ing because of their misery; but in true gardens,. with real 
flowers, and real sunshine, and children dancing because 
of their gladness ; so that truly the streets shall be full 
(the 'streets,' mind you, not the gutters) of children, play- 
ing in the midst thereof.^ We may take care that working- 
men shall have at least as good books to read as anybody 
else, when they've time to read them ; and as comfortable 
firesides to sit at as anybody else, when they've time to sit 
at them. This, I think, can be managed for you, my work- 
ing friends, in the good time. 

IV. I must go on, however, to our last head, concern- 
ing ourselves all, as workers. What is wise work, and 
what is foolish work } What the difference between sense 
and nonsense, in daily occupation ? 

1 Break stones : that is, go to the work-house, where the male paupers 
are often set to break stones for repairing the macadamized roads. 

2 Zechariah viii. 5, 



WORK. 



137 



Well, wise work is, briefly, work with God. Foolish 
work is work against God. And work done with God, 
which He will help, may be briefly described as ' Putting 
in Order ' — that is, enforcing God's law of order, spiritual 
and material, over men and things. The first thing you 
have to do, essentially ; the real ' good work ' is, with re- 
spect to men, to enforce justice, and with respect to things, 
to enforce tidiness, and fruitfulness. And against these 
two great human deeds, justice and order, there are perpet- 
ually two great demons contending, — the devil of iniquity, 
or inequity,! and the devil of disorder, or of death ; for 
death is only consummation of disorder. You have to fight 
these two fiends daily. So far as you don't fight against 
the fiend of iniquity, you work for him. You ' work ini- 
quity,' and the judgment upon you, for all your 'Lord, 
Lord's,' will be 'Depart from me, ye that work iniquity.' 2 
And so far as you do not resist the fiend of disorder, you 
work disorder, and you yourself do the work of Death, 
which is sin, and has for its wages, Death himself.^ 

Observe then, all wise work is mainly threefold in char- 
acter. It is honest, useful, and cheerful. 

L It is HONEST. I hardly know anything more strange 
than that you recognize honesty in play, and you do not in 
work. In your lightest games, you have always some one 
to see what you call 'fair-play.' In boxing, you must hit 
fair; in racing, start fair. Your English watchword is 
fair-play, your English hatred, foul-play. Did it ever strike 
you that you wanted another watchword also, fair-work, 
and another hatred also, foul-work ? Your prize-fighter has 

1 Inequity : (literally, not equity') injustice. 

2 Matthew vii. 23. 

3 Romans vi. 23. 



138 JOHN RUSKm. 

some honor in him yet ; and so have the men in the ring 
round him : they will judge him to lose the match, by foul 
hitting. But your prize-merchant gains his match by foul 
selling, and no one cries out against that. You drive a 
gambler out of the gambling-room who loads dice,^ but you 
leave a tradesman in flourishing business, who loads scales ! ^ 
For observe, all dishonest dealing is loading scales. What 
does it matter whether I get short weight, adulterate sub- 
stance, or dishonest fabric } The fault in the fabric is in- 
comparably the worst of the two. Give me short measure 
of food, and I only lose by you ; but give me adulterate 
food, and I die by you. Here, then, is your chief duty, you 
workmen and tradesmen — to be true to yourselves, and to 
us who would help you. We can do nothing for you, nor 
you for yourselves, without honesty. Get that, you get all ; 
without that, your suffrages,^ your reforms, your free-trade 
measures, your institutions of science are all in vain. It is 
useless to put your heads together, if you can't put your 
hearts together. Shoulder to shoulder, right hand to right 
hand, among yourselves, and no wrong hand to anybody 
else, and you'll win the world yet. 

II. Then, secondly, wise work is useful. No man 
minds, or ought to mind, its being hard, if only it comes 
to something; but when it is hardj and comes to noth- 
ing ; when all our bees' business turns to spiders' ; and 
for honey-comb we have only resultant cobweb, blown 
away by the next breeze — that is the cruel thing for the 
worker. Yet do we ever ask ourselves, personally, or even 

1 Loads dice : loaded dice are dice made so that, when they are thrown, 
the high and winning numbers come uppermost. 

2 Loads scales : cheats in the weight. 

3 Suffrages : votes. 



WORK. 



139 



nationally, whether our work is coming to anything or not ? 
We don't care to keep what has been nobly done ; still less 
do we care to do nobly what others would keep ; and, least 
of all, to make the work itself useful instead of deadly to 
the doer, so as to use his life indeed, but not to waste it. 
Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is 
the waste of labor. If you went down in the morning into 
your dairy, and you found that your youngest child had got 
down before you; and that he and the cat were at play 
together, and that he had poured out all the cream on the 
floor for the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, and be 
sorry the milk was wasted. But if, instead of wooden bowls 
with milk in them, there are golden bowls with human life 
in them, and instead of the cat to play with — the devil to 
play with ; and you yourself the player ; and instead of leav- 
ing that golden bowF to be broken by God at the fountain, 
you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the human blood 
out on the ground for the fiend to lick up — that is no waste ! 
What ! you perhaps think, 'to waste the labor of men is not 
to kill them.' Is it not .? I should like to know how you 
could kill them more utterly — kill them with second deaths, 
seventh deaths, hundredfold deaths .? It is the slightest way 
of killing to stop a man's breath. Nay, the hunger, and the 
cold, and the little whistling bullets — our love-messengers 
between nation and nation — have brought pleasant mes- 
sages from us to many a man before now ; orders of sweet 
release, and leave at last to go where he will be most wel- 
come and most happy. At the worst you do but shorten 
his life, you do not corrupt his life. But if you put him to 
base labor, if you bind his thoughts, if you blind his eyes, if 

1 Golden Bowl : a golden bowl-shaped lamp, used figuratively for the lamp 
of life, It is the " pitcher " which Ruskin has in mind. See Ecclesiastes xii. 6. 



140 JOHN RUSK IN. 

you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his 
body, and blast his soul, and at last leave him not so much 
as to reap the poor fruit of his degradation, but gather that 
for yourself, and dismiss him to the grave, when you have 
done with him, having, so far as in you lay, made the walls 
of that grave everlasting (though, indeed, I fancy the goodly 
bricks of some of our family vaults will hold closer in the 
resurrection day than the sod over the laborer's head), this 
you think is no waste, and no sin ! 

III. Then, lastly, wise work is cheerful, as a child's 
work is. And now I want you to take one thought home 
with you, and let it stay with you. 

Everybody in this room has been taught to pray daily, 
*Thy kingdom come.' Now, if we hear a man swear in the 
streets, we think it very wrong, and say he 'takes God's 
name in vain.' But there's a twenty times worse way of 
taking His name in vain, than that. It is to ask God for 
what we doii t want. He doesn't like that sort of prayer. 
If you don't want a thing, don't ask for it : such asking is 
the worst mockery of your King you can mock him with ; 
the soldiers striking Him on the head with the reed was 
nothing to that. If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't 
pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray 
for it; you must work for it. And, to work for it, you 
must know what it is : we have all prayed for it many a 
day without thinking. Observe, it is a kingdom that is to 
come to us ; we are not to go to it. Also, it is not to be a 
kingdom of the dead, but of the living. Also, it is not to 
come all at once, but quietly; nobody knows how. 'The 
kingdom of God cometh not with observation.' ^ Also, it is 
not to come outside of us, but in the hearts of us: 'the 

1 Luke xvii. 20. 



WORK. 141 

kingdom of God is within you.' And, being within us, it is 
not a thing to be seen, but to be felt ; and though it brings 
all substance of good with it, it does not consist in that: 
*the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteous- 
ness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost :'i joy, that is to 
say, in the holy, healthful, and helpful Spirit. Now, if we 
want to work for this kingdom, and to bring it, and enter 
into it, there's just one condition to be first accepted. You 
must enter it as children, or not at all; ' Whosoever will 
not receive it as a little child shall not enter therein.' 2 
And again, 'Suffer little children to come unto me, and 
forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' ^ 

Of sHch, observe. Not of children themselves, but of 
such as children. I believe most mothers who read that 
text think that all heaven is to be full of babies. But 
that's not so. There will be children there, but the hoary 
head is the crown. 'Length of days, and long life and 
peace,'* that is the blessing, not to die in babyhood. Chil- 
dren die but for their parents' sins; God means them to 
live, but He can't let them always; then they have their 
earlier place in heaven : and the little child of David, vainly 
prayed for;^ — the little child of Jeroboam, killed by its 
mother's step on its own threshold,^ — they will be there. 
But weary old David, and weary old Barzillai,' having 
learned children's lessons at last, will be there too, and 
the one question for us all, young or old, is, have we 
learned our child's lesson } it is the cJiaractcr of children 
we want : and must gain at our peril ; let us see, briefly, 
in what it consists. 

1 Romans xiv. 17 3 Luke xviii. 16. ^ 2 Samuel xii. 16. 

" Mark x. 15. * Proverbs iii, 2. ^ \ Kings xiv. 17. 

' 2 Samuel xix. 31-39. 



142 JOHN RUSK IN. 

The first character of right childhood is that it is Modest. 
A well-bred child does not think it can teach its parents, 
or that it knows everything. It may think its father and 
mother know everything, — perhaps that all grown-up 
people know everything ; very certainly it is sure that it 
does not. And it is always asking questions, and wanting 
to know more. Well, that is the first character of a good 
and wise man at his work. To know that he knows very 
little ; — to perceive that there are many above him wiser 
than he ; and to be always asking questions, wanting to 
learn, not to teach. No one ever teaches well who wants 
to teach, or governs well who wants to govern ; it is an 
old saying (Plato's, but I know not if his, first), and as 
wise as old. 

Then, the second character of right childhood is to be 
Faithful. Perceiving that its father knows best what is 
good for it, and having found always, when it has tried its 
own way against his, that he was right and it was wrong, 
a noble child trusts him at last wholly, gives him its hand, 
and will walk blindfold with him, if he bids it. And that 
is the true character of all good men also, as obedient 
workers, or soldiers under captains. They must trust 
their captains ; they are bound for their lives to choose 
none but those whom they can trust. Then, they are not 
always to be thinking that what seems strange to them, or 
wrong in what they are desired to do, is strange or wrong. 
They know their captain : where he leads they must fol- 
low, what he bids they must do ; and without this trust 
and faith, without this captainship and soldiership, no great 
deed, no great salvation, is possible to man. Among all 
the nations it is only when this faith is attained by them 
that they become great : the Jew, the Greek, and the Ma- 



WORK. 143 

hometan, agree at least in testifying to this. It was a 
deed of this absolute trust which made Abraham the father 
of the faithful ; it was the declaration of the power of God 
as captain over all men, and the acceptance of a leader ap- 
pointed by Him as commander of the faithful, which laid 
the foundation of whatever national power yet exists in 
the East ; and the deed of the Greeks, which has become 
the type of unselfish and noble soldiership to all lands, and 
to all times, was commemorated, on the tomb of those who 
gave their lives to do it, in the most pathetic, so far as I 
know, or can feel, of all human utterances : ' Oh, stranger, 
go and tell our people that we are lying here, having obeyed 
their words.' ^ 

/ Then the third character of right childhood is to be Lov- 
ing and Generous. Give a little love to a child, and you 
get a great deal back. It loves everything near it, when it 
is a right kind of child — would hurt nothing, would give 
the best it has away, always, if you need it — does not 
lay plans for getting everything in the house for itself, and 
delights in helping people ; you cannot please it so much 
as by giving it a chance of being useful, in ever so little a 
way. 

And because of all these characters, lastly, it is Cheerful. 
Putting its trust in its father, it is careful ^ for nothing — 
being full of love to every creature, it is happy always, 
whether in its play or in its duty. Well, that's the great 

1 When Xerxes in the fifth century B.C. invaded Greece, Leonidas, with three 
hundred Spartans, withstood his enormous army at the mountain pass of Ther- 
mopylae. Leonidas and his brave men were slain ; but the defeat, like our 
Bunker Hill, roused all Greece, and, in the end, they triumphed. Subse- 
quently, the above inscription was cut on the rock of Thermopylae as a memo- 
rial of the three hundred. 

2 Careful : here, anxious. See Philippians iv. 6. 



144 JOHN RUSK IN. 

worker's character also. Taking no thought ^ for the mor- 
row ; taking thought only for the duty of the day ; trusting 
somebody else to take care of to-morrow ; knowing indeed 
what labor is, but not what sorrow is ; and always ready 
for play — beautiful play, — for lovely human play is like 
the play of the Sun. There's a worker for you. He, 
steady to his time, is set as a strong man to run his course, 
but also, he rejoiceth as a atrong man 'to run his course.*'* 
See how he plays in the morning, with the mists below, 
and the clouds above, with a ray here and a flash there, 
and a shower of jewels everywhere; — that's the Sun's 
play ; and the great human play is like his — all various — 
all full of light and life, and tender, as the dew of the 
morning. 

So then, you have the child's character in these four 
things — Humility, Faith, Charity, and Cheerfulness. That's 
what you have got to be converted to. ' Except ye be con- 
verted and become as little children ' ^ — -you hear much of 
conversion now-a-days ; but people always seem to think 
they have got to be made wretched by conversion, — to be 
converted to long faces. No, friends, you have got to be 
converted to short ones ; you have to repent into child- 
hood, to repent into delight, and delightsomeness. You 
can't go into a conventicle * but you'll hear plenty of talk 
of backsliding. Backsliding, indeed ! I can tell you, on 
the ways most of us go, the faster we slide back the better. 
Slide back into the cradle, if going on is into the grave — 
back, I tell you ; back — out of your long faces, and into 
your long clothes. It is among children only, and as chil- 

1 Taking no thought: here, not being solicitous or concerned. See 
Matthew vi. 34, 

2 See Psahns xix. 5. ^ Matthew xviii. 3. 
* Conventicle : a meeting-house. 



WORK. 145 

dren only, that you will find medicine for your healing and 
true wisdom for your teaching. There is poison in the 
counsels of the men of this world ; the words they speak 
are all bitterness, ' the poison of the asps is under their 
lips,' 1 but 'the sucking child shall play by the hole of the 
asp.' 2 There is death in the looks of men. 'Their eyes 
are privily set against the poor ; ^ they are as the uncharm- 
able serpent, the cockatrice,* which slew by seeing. But 
the weaned child shall lay his hand on the cockatrice den.' ^ 
There is death in the steps of men : ' their feet are swift 
to shed blood ; they have compassed us in our steps like 
the lion that is greedy of his prey, and the young lion lurk- 
ing in secret places,' ^ but, in that kingdom, the wolf shall 
lie down with the lamb, and the fatling with the lion, and 
'a little child shall lead them.'^ There is death in the 
thoughts of men : the world is one wide riddle to them, 
darker and darker as it draws to a close ; but the secret of 
it is known to the child and the Lord of heaven and earth 
is most to be thanked in that ' He has hidden these things 
^from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto 
babes.' ^ Yes, and there is death — infinitude of death in 
the principalities and powers of men. As far as the east 
is from the west, so far our sins are — not set from us, but 
multiplied around us : the Sun himself, think you he 7iow 
'rejoices' to run his course, when he plunges westward 
to the horizon, so widely red, not with clouds, but blood } 
And it will be red more widely yet. Whatever drought of 
the early and latter rain may be, there will be none of that 

1 Asp: a deadly serpent common in Egypt. Romans iii. 13. 

2 Isaiah xi. 8. ^ Psalms x. 8. 

* Cockatrice: a fabulous monster, part serpent, part bird; its look even 
was said to be fatal. ^ Isaiah xi. 6. 

6 Psalms xvii. 12. '^ Isaiah xi. 6. ^ Matthew xi. 25. 



146 JOHN RUSK IN. 

red rain. You fortify yourselves, you arm yourselves 
against it in vain ; the enemy and avenger will be upon 
you also, unless you learn that it is not out of the mouths 
of the needle gun, ^ or the rifle, but ' out of the mouths of 
babes and sucklings ' ^ that the strength is ordained, which 
shall ' still the enemy and avenger.' ^ 

1 Needle gun : an improved breech-loading gun — the hammer of the lock 
has a needle-shaped point. 

2 Matthew xxi. 16, 

3 Psalms viii. 2. 



INDEX TO NOTES. 



(D. H. M.) 



Abbot, xiii. 
yEschylus, 62. • 
Alighieri, 32. 
Amain, 23. 
Andromache, 61. 
Anon, 93. 
Antigone, 61. 
Apocalypse, viii. 
Asp, 145. 
Athena, 48. 

Baden Baden, 122. 
Bag, The, 126, 
Battersea Fields, 92. 
Beadles, 104. 
Bethels, 104. 
Bishop, 26. 
Bishop Colenso, 128. 
Black North Country, 

122. 
Bond Street, 120. 
Break Stones, 136. 
Britomart, 61. 
Bye-perquisites, 126. 

Caina, 45. 
Camberwell, 114. 
Canaille, 19. 
Cantel, 47. 
Careful, 143. 
Chanueleon, 20. 



Chamouni, 44, 
Chivalry, 63. 
Chrysolite, 84. 
Clever, 19. 
Cockatrice, 145. 
Collier, 129. 
Conscript, 89. 
Contumely, 22. 
Conventicle, 144. 
Corn Laws, 51. 
Coventry, xv. 
Coxcomb, 56. 
Cretinous, 29. 
Crib, xiv. 

Dais, xiv. 

Dances of Death, 86. 
Dean, xiv. 

Deep-pictured tissue, 48. 
Dei Gratia, 83. 
Delphian, 48. 
Dialects, 22. 
Diets, 76. 

Double-belled doors, 7. 
Doublets, 121. 

Elysian, 16. 
Enow, 23. 
Ensamples, 26. 
Entree, 15. 
Episcopal, 24. 



Equites, 108. 
Exeter Hall, 104. 

Faubourg St. Germain, 

16. 
Fifteen millions, 121. 
Flashy, 24. 
Footmen, 45. 
Fritillary, 15. 

Game-preserving, 120. 
Gentleman-commoner, 

xii. 
Gladiatorial war, 90. 
Golden Bowl, 139. 
Gorgonian, xiv. 
Greek word, 22. 

Harness, 46. 
Heatherly, 77. 
Helm, 48. 
Hierarchy, 109. 
Him, 32. 
Howitzers, 44. 
Hyperbole, 85. 

Iffley, XV. 

II gran refiuto, 47. 
Incognisable, 98. 
Inequity, 137. 
Insignia, 52. 



148 



JOHN RUSK IN. 



In store, 21. 
Integer vitse, 1 08. 
Iphigenia, 61. 
Island of zEgina, 77. 

Jerkin, xii. 
Joan of Arc, 75. 
Jousting, 91. 

Knight, 40. 

Lack, 42. 
La donna, 67. 
Lawgiver, 78. 
Lese-majeste, xv. 
Lethe, 86. 
List, 24. 
Listeth, 28. 
Lists, 91. 
Loads dice, 138. 
Loads scales, 138. 
Luini, xxi. 

Madeleine, 87. 

Magnanimous, 44. 

Major Domo, x. 

Matilda, 86. 

Matins and Vespers, 76. 

Maximum, 49. 

Mazzini, ix. 

Menai, 77, 

Mitred, 23. 

MUller, 23. 

Munich, 41. 

Mute, 112. 

My Lord, 9. 

Mythical, 61. 

Nausicaa, 61. 
Nebula, 40. 



Needle gun, 146. 
Noblesse, 19. 
Nomenclature^ 19. 

Observatory, 40. 
Olympic, 90. 
Orders, 45. 

Parnassus, 77. 

Pavv^ns, 90. 

Pelasgi and Meraclidee, 

xiv. 
Penelope, 61. 
Pertinent, 32. 
Pharos, 66. 
Philologists, 122. 
Pipe, 24. 
Piping, 122. 
Pisa, 60. 
Portieres, 16. 
Potable, 48. 
Pound, 41. 
Presbyter, 22. 
Pressed sailor, 89. 
Pure water, xxii. 

Qual pium, 67. 

Ratification, xii. 

Reading, xvi. 

Recks, 24, 

Resolve another nebula, 

40. 
Rex et Regina, 82. 
Rock Apostle, 30. 
Roi et Reine, 82. 
Roll, 135. 

Salisbury steeple, 27. 
Sancho Panza, 129. 



Sanguine seed, 88. 
Savoir fnire, xv. 
Scorpion whips, 38. 
Scrannel, 24. 
Scythian, 44. 
Sesame, 51. 
Snowdon, 77. 
SoUennis, 2. 
Spartans, 143. 
Sped, 24. 
Spurs^ioo. 
Squires, 40. 
Stone, 93. 
Stones, 136. 
Suffrages, 138. 

Taking no thought, 144. 
Taxation, 50. 
Tertiary, 10. 
Thought, 144. 
Three thousand pounds, 

120. 
Titians, 43/ 
Trappings, 44. 

Una, 61. 
Undone, ix. 

Vassals, 81. 
Verulam, xvi^i. 
Vestal, 66. 
Vintner, xii. 
Vortices, x. 
Vulcanian, 48. 

What dy'e lack ? 42. 
What refcks it them? 24. 
World-father, 135. 

Zurich, 44. 



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